RH Reality Check » Reality Cast

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Kathryn Joyce about her new book on evangelicals and adoption. Anti-choicers start a disinformation campaign around the case of Kermit Gosnell and Virginia passes new regulations to shut down safe, legal clinics.

Leslie Morgan Steiner gave a really good, 16 minute TED Talk on why victims of domestic violence struggle to leave. She explained the usual reason, such as being in denial and being afraid of being murdered, but here are some points you may not have heard before.

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Something to think about when you see all those so-called “men’s rights activists” angling to make it harder for women to move, to maintain custody, or to demanding the right to sue their ex-wives over and over and over again in an attempt to reduce child support. Many of them aren’t seeking fairness or justice, but are looking for excuses to continue controlling a woman who left them because of their violence.

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Last weekend, there was a coordinated campaign on the right to float a very serious accusation and needless to say untrue accusation: That liberals and feminists in the media had, either deliberately or because of some sort of “liberal bias”, chosen to “cover up” the crimes of Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia. Gosnell, as I reported on this show two years ago when he was arrested, is accused of 8 counts of murder, one woman and 7 infants that were born in his clinic and murdered by Gosnell and his staff. Gosnell was a seedy, underground abortion provider who got away with operating a filthy clinic that didn’t meet any kind of basic medical standards and who exploited women who were poor and didn’t have access to decent abortion care. He is universally condemned, but anti-choicers would like you to believe that’s not the case. Which is why they are accusing feminists of “covering it up” by not covering it in the media.

Warning: This clip from Fox News is egregiously dishonest, even by their standards, and might make your blood pressure rise from the sheer nerve of these people.

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He also claimed that pro-choice groups and spokespeople have been completely silent about Gosnell, except for the National Abortion Federation. Needless to say, the lies told here were easy enough to suss out. As for the claim that MSNBC didn’t cover the case, it took me just a few seconds to find this clip from 2011 from MSNBC.

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The reason he didn’t list the print sources is because it’s an even easier lie to pick out, as pretty much every major national paper and news website covered the arrests and the charges. He also neglects to mention radio, probably because NPR covered the story extensively, such as this piece from 2011.

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As for the claim that pro-choicer organizations and spokespeople are refusing to comment on this story? That is also, unsurprisingly, a giant lie. Here is yours truly in 2011 on this very podcast.

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So why are they lying about this? It’s pretty simple, really: By claiming that we’re hiding something, they can imply that we have something to hide. They can therefore insinuate that pro-choicers are somehow complicit in Gosnell’s crimes without coming right out and saying it, opening themselves up to accusations of slander and libel and perhaps even getting sued. So, instead the vague charge of “media bias” is floated, and what makes it so great is that it’s classic moving goal posts. You point out that you covered it, and they can say, “Not enough.” It’s a terrible, evil thing to do.

The timing of this conservative campaign tells you the whole story. The trial has been going on for a few weeks now, but only now are they started to complain about the lack of coverage. It’s easy enough to figure out what they’re doing. They know that once he’s convicted, there’s going to be an avalanche of coverage from mainstream and liberal media, which will make it hard for them to sell the B.S. claim that someone is “hiding” something. So they use a natural lull in the coverage to claim that the media isn’t doing enough, and then take credit for the eventual coverage that they know was coming anyway. It’s sick and devious, but I’ve seen this strategy before—twice now I’ve had conservatives start to flood me on Twitter claiming I was “ignoring” a story that had literally just come out and that I was, in reality, already writing about. The idea is to hit the target with a complaint that they’re “covering up” a story before they can reasonably be expected to cover it. That’s the kind of sleaze that we’re dealing with here.

So why are they working the refs so hard on this? Simple: Anti-choicers know that they bear responsibility for what happened, and not just because one of Gosnell’s victims said she avoided Planned Parenthood for fear of protesters. Gosnell was able to get so many customers because anti-choice policies such as the Hyde Amendment made it impossible for women to afford safe, legal abortion. They know that if abortion is banned, the number of men doing what Gosnell was doing will rise exponentially. So they’re trying to control the narrative by making it about overtly dishonest claims of “media bias” so that the real discussion of how this happened is overshadowed. They really, really don’t want to talk about the real causes of this, and so will tell any lie it takes to avoid that conversation.

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That was Rep. Paul Ryan, speaking to the slanderously named anti-choice group the Susan B. Anthony List. His claim that you can somehow just wish abortion away by restricting and discouraging it was echoed by North Dakota state representative Bette Grande, who defended her bill banning abortions at 6 weeks by claiming women don’t know there’s a “beating heart” in there, and insinuating they won’t want an abortion if they do know. It seems anti-choicers are getting more ridiculous lately with their claims that women wouldn’t have abortions if feminists didn’t goad them into it. But as the Kermit Gosnell trial shows, the opposite is true: Even if women have no opportunity for a safe, legal abortion, they will be so determined to end unwanted pregnancies that they’ll subject themselves to scary, dangerous conditions. Anti-choicers are ramping up the lies about what it means to end legal abortion because in many places, they’re getting closer to it—and they need to be able to hand wave and distract people from the inevitable results.

Virginia is one of those places.

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It’s worth noting that none of these new rules will make patients one bit safer. A useful point of comparison is with Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a ton of TRAP laws, i.e. targeted regulations of abortion providers, designed to make it harder for abortion clinics to work. There are mandatory waiting periods, restrictions on who can refer an abortion patient, and what NARAL describes as a “a uniquely imposed licensure scheme” not required of other clinics that provide similar medical interventions. None of these extra-special requirements had any relevance to the Gosnell clinic, since he was shut down for violating common laws applicable to all medical providers, as well as laws against murder. However, these laws reduced the number of legitimate abortion providers in the state from 50 to 13. With such a drastic reduction in access, an illegal provider like Gosnell was sure to see a lot more patients. Virginia is now creating a similar situation of shutting down all the legitimate clinics. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if the vacuum that creates allows butchers like Gosnell to start flourishing.

Charniele Herring, a delegate from Virginia, went on the Maddow show to explain exactly what’s going on here.

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Ken Cuccinelli’s hand in all this tells you everything you need to know. This is not about safety or women’s wellbeing, and I honestly don’t think anyone is fooled by claims otherwise. This is about the opposite, which is driving abortion out of safe, legal clinics and onto a black market where it’s dangerous, illegal, and, as happened at Gosnell’s clinic, may even be fatal. None of this is a surprise to anti-choicers. They may claim that they’re going to wipe out abortion, but they know that this is just about wiping out safe, legal abortion. By and large, I suspect the folks behind this just don’t care if some women get injured or killed seeking illegal abortion. Why they consider themselves worthy to dictate health care policy with such an anti-health attitude is beyond me.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, cheerleading violence against women edition. Congressman Steve Stockman has a new bumper sticker out.

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There’s not a lot of interpretative wiggle room here. This is a fantasy about punishing women who have abortions by killing them, and distastefully it’s being blamed on “babies”, even though babies can’t fire guns, and certain the brainless embryos that are removed during your typical abortion couldn’t even want to. It’s a threat, and since one in three women in America will have an abortion, it’s one that women who have had abortions will definitely see when they see cars with these bumper stickers.

The post Evangelicals & Adoption, The Gosnell Misinformation Campaign, And Virginia’s New TRAP Regs appeared first on RH Reality Check.

The history of the ban on dildos in Texas

Speaking out against abstinence-only

Pam Stenzel misinformation

Kansas passes new anti-abortion legislation

Threatening pill users with death

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to legal expert Jody Raphael about rape culture and why it’s so hard to prosecute rapes. A high school senior stands up to an abstinence-only liar, and Kansas encourages its violent militants in their quest to end legal abortion.

Sex educator Julie Sunday posted a lecture she gave for Nerd Night in Austin about the state’s long-standing war on legal sex toys.

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The law was overturned by the court, who found it was a violation of the decision Lawrence v. Texas that found the state cannot monitor safe, consensual sexual activity that adults have in private.

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Abstinence-only programs have faded somewhat from public consciousness as federal support has dwindled and public opinion has turned against them. Still, that shouldn’t let any of us be fooled into thinking they’ve disappeared. As long as there are Christian right wing fanatics getting jobs in education and thinking it’s appropriate to use school resources to shove their religious beliefs on the students, abstinence-only is going to crop up. Now there’s a conflict in West Virginia, because high school student Katelyn Campbell filed an injunction against her principal to prevent him from retaliating against her for telling the press about the terrible abstinence-only speaker Pam Stenzel being hired to shove Christian propaganda at the students. Katelyn went on HuffPost Live to talk about her struggles.

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The reason she got the injunction is she claims he threatened to call Wellesley College, where Katelyn has a scholarship, and try to get them to revoke her admittance. The university responded to the charges on Twitter by saying they think Katelyn is great and can’t wait to have her as a student. The school is a famous women’s university that promotes feminist values, making it laughable in the extreme that anyone would think they’d be opposed to a student speaking up for comprehensive sex education.

It’s shameful that any school anywhere would hire Pam Stenzel, even for free, to do her schtick of yelling at students and shaming them for being sexual human beings. In a recording one of the students at the high school took, you get to hear Stenzel say terrible, terrible false things. I listened to the recording, which is nearly an hour long, to hear these terrible things. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. It’s basically being yelled at for an hour by someone who clearly just hates everyone because she thinks they’re a bunch of filthy lust monsters. For instance, she threatens the girls, telling them if they have sex, they’ll become infertile.

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SEICUS has a report about the lies Pam Stenzel tells, and needless to say her claim that infertility has skyrocketed is just wrong. They report evidence that shows that infertility rates haven’t changed, and point out that the increased attention to it is the result of more women having children in their 30s and 40s. But as far as Stenzel is concerned, the entire world is a seething mass of disease and decay, and it’s all because they have the icky, gross sex.

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Listening to this talk, you get the impression that the only way that someone can ever catch a disease is to have sex, and of course that everyone who has sex is crippled with disease. It’s extremely silly. For one thing, 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex, so her insinuation that having sex without a wedding band means being a disease-ridden pariah forever simply doesn’t pass the common sense test. Second of all, there are other ways disease are transmitted. You go to college and abstain from sex, okay, but you’re still around other people and so you’ll probably catch the flu or a cold plenty enough. If STIs are so bad that one should basically put their entire sexual and romantic life on hold to avoid them, then why don’t other diseases require the same level of overreaction? If the only solution to STIs is abstaining from sex, by the same logic, the only solution to the flu is abstaining from seeing other people at all.

She tries to get around this by claiming that we’re all going to die from untreatable diseases if we have premarital sex, or that if you have sex it will make you unmarriageable because of your supposed status as a leper.

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She seems to be referring to HPV, which is a common STI that does cause genital warts and can lead, in a small number of cases, to cervical cancer. She loves the phrase “radical hysterectomy”, but for women who are getting regular Pap smears, cervical cancer can be easily prevented by a very short procedure that is nothing like a hysterectomy, much less a quote-unquote “radical” one. She lies, of course, by painting HPV as a lifelong curse, when it causes no problems in most people and goes away on its own most of the time. More to the point, she completely neglects to tell her audience that they can avoid HPV altogether by getting vaccinated. Anyone who actually cares about preventing STIs would tell a roomful of kids to get this simple vaccination. I’m getting the feeling that she wants kids to get HPV as punishment for inevitably defying her orders to simply not have sex.

If you detected a note of sarcasm in her discussion of the concept of love, you aren’t mistaken. Throughout this entire speech, Stenzel talks about love with a tone of contempt, and seems to find it implausible that sexually active people even know what love is.

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Yep, she basically comes right and says that if a man wants to have sex with you, he doesn’t love you. She tries to frame it as a “boundaries” thing to make it sound better, but if you really think about it, this is about sex and not respect. She seems to think the only way men respect women is to not want sex and that women never want sex, and only have it to please men. The possibility that men and women choose it together to have fun, or god forbid, express their love, isn’t even entertained here.

Good on Katelyn Campbell for standing up to her school for bringing Pam Stenzel in. No teenager deserves to be treated to such a misanthropic, hateful liar who wants you to believe that you’re a dirty person for having sex.

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What’s the matter with Kansas? Despite the fact that heavy anti-abortion activity in that state led to a man’s murder in 2009, state legislators there are determined to stoke the situation even more by passing even more restrictive laws on abortion. More restrictive, but also more ambiguous, to better create a situation where zealots can find avenues to harass abortion providers.

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Kansas isn’t the first state to have some weird language about “life” beginning at fertilization, but in their environment, it’s especially concerning. Before an anti-choice zealot assassinated Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, a district attorney named Phill Kline went on a legal digging operation on Dr. Tiller, trying to find some law he supposedly broke at the behest of the anti-choice movement in the area. After months of digging and putting the doctor on trial, nothing came of it, because he didn’t do anything. In fact, Phill Kline was eventually brought up for disbarment because of his wildly unethical behavior and abuse of power in that situation. However, the targeting of Dr. Tiller for this kind of legal harassment was probably a contributing factor to his eventual murder, as his killer, Scott Roeder, was deeply upset that the B.S. harassment campaign did not result in shutting down Dr. Tiller’s clinic. Kansas legislators took one look at this terrible situation and decided that the best bet was to create this life-begins-at-fertilization law, which seems to only serve the purpose of justifying more harassment of already beleaguered providers.

Well, that and apparently funnel money towards people who use it to proselytize instead of offer actual services.

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The woman they interview works at a crisis pregnancy center, which is to say that she spends her days trying to lure women with unwanted pregnancies into her center so she can try to bully them out of abortions. These centers often make promises they can’t keep regarding support for women who have their babies. That’s why your eyebrows should be sky high at the claim that resources redirected from actual family planning clinics to crisis pregnancy centers could be used to help people. In other states, they’ve done that, and the result is that very little help is actually offered. Women need real services, such as medical care and contraception, not being given a lecture on abstinence and a teddy bear to give their baby once it’s born. Redirecting more money to places that don’t use it for real services is a terrible idea.

Unfortunately, that might be the least of the concerns here, because right now, the anti-choice militants in the state are getting uglier and more overt with the insinuated threats of violence. David Leach of the Army of God posted audio of him talking with Dr. Tiller’s murderer, Scott Roeder, online, just in case abortion providers didn’t get the message.

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These are the people who feel like the legislation has their back when they pass laws saying life begins at fertilization. This is very concerning indeed. But despite the fact that it’s basically a big, wet kiss to anti-choice militants who are making threats of terrorism, Gov. Brownback of Kansas signed the bill into law. And he gave the raspberry to our First Amendment protections of freedom of religion while doing so, writing “JESUS + Mary” on the top of his notes so the AP photographer could see them.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, as much Pam Stenzel as you can take edition. NARAL sent out an email protesting the West Virginia situation I reported on in this podcast, and reminded me that Pam Stenzel likes to threaten people with death and infertility if they use female-controlled contraception.

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This is a complete lie. There is no reason whatsoever to think that someone using the pill is more likely to get an STI than someone having sex without using any protection whatsoever. Stenzel’s long history of anti-choice activism suggests something else entirely: She thinks non-procreative sex is wrong, and will use any tactic, including lies and threats, to make sure as many women who are having sex are getting pregnant as possible, no matter if they’re ready to be mothers or not.

The post Kansas Fails Again, Pam Stenzel Scares Kids, And Ending Rape Culture appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Obama addresses Planned Parenthood

Don’t stop training family doctors on birth control!

Pat Roberston compares birth control clinics to the Holocaust

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing the author of a new book called Generation Roe. There’s a chance that family physicians will stop getting proper training in contraception in some programs, and a Lifetime reality show demonstrates the dangers facing girls with virginity-obsessed parents.

President Obama addressed Planned Parenthood in a charming 12 minute speech at their national conference. Here’s a tiny bit for a taster:

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He assured the crowd that even though right wing attacks on Planned Parenthood have escalated, he will do his best to defend the organization and its work.

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While most of the focus in the reproductive health debates is on specialists such as gynecologists and particularly family planning clinics and abortion clinics, there’s a huge swath of American women that actually get much of their reproductive health care from another source: Family practitioners. Unfortunately, while the demand for contraception care from these kind of general doctors hasn’t gone away, there might be a decline in the availability of well-trained family doctors who know how to prescribe contraception correctly, because the American Academy of Family Physicians is considering removing a requirement from their training standards requiring students to learn how to prescribe contraception. NPR did a report.

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Getting that training into the program was a big victory for women’s health and now there’s a lot of concerns that it might be going away, much to the dismay of women’s health advocates who fear that it’s already hard enough for women to get the reproductive health care they need under the current circumstances. Because of the political ugliness as of late, it’s tempting to assume that the Academy is cracking under anti-choice pressure, but as far as I can tell, that’s really not the case. It’s more a mundane attempt to make things a little easier, in no small part because the doctors they’re training are so badly needed and anything that’s perceived as an obstacle to getting more doctors certified is being considered for the chopping block.

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So nothing sinister going on here. One group we can largely rely on to be supportive of contraception and abortion care is people running this medical association or that, because outside of the ideologically right wing ones, most of them are focused on what’s best for patients and what the science says. And in both cases, the answer is more and better access to the tools to control their fertility. Indeed, if it were just a matter of patient care and science, then loosening these restrictions up would be no big deal, because training programs would offer them as a matter of course. Unfortunately, in the real world, right wing politics and religious fundamentalism keep getting involved.

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This is where the sinister stuff comes in! As NPR reports, 11 out of 25 of the largest health systems in the U.S. are Catholic-run, and I’m guessing they’re going to be happy to cut contraception training wherever they can. The only thing keeping them from doing that is the training requirements. If this weren’t a nasty, politicized issue, I would have no problem with the Academy streamlining and minimizing their requirements, since getting more good doctors out the door and into communities is a priority. But the anti-choice pressure on the health system level makes that not a good idea. The comment session is closed now, but hopefully, the American Academy of Family Physicians will do the right thing and keep these requirements.

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I was only recently alerted to the existence of a new reality TV series on Lifetime called “Preachers’ Daughters”, a show that follows around three families of evangelical preachers and how their obsession with controlling female sexuality harms their daughters specifically. I watched the most recent episode, the 7^th of the series, and even though you may know intellectually how much fundamentalist Christianity teaches that women are the property of their fathers until they’re transferred into the hands of their husbands, their new owners, it’s still hard to hear men express those attitudes so easily. Like Mark, the father of Olivia, who is upset because his 18-year-old daughter Olivia wants to—gasp!—go hang out with her older sister in Los Angeles for a weekend.

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Olivia got pregnant as a teenager, which is no big surprise when you grow up in a culture that shames you so much about your sexuality that it makes actually planning for sex and using contraception nearly impossible. Instead of letting his daughter’s sad story cause anything like introspection, however, Mark simply characterizes it as a betrayal, as if Olivia’s body belongs to him and, by having sex, she took away something that was his. Now it seems she walks around having to live as some kind of embodiment of female sinfulness, instead of as a full human being who deserved better than to be stuck at age 18 with very little idea of what to do with herself.

Olivia’s rebellious urges are somewhat buried under her still-lingering senses that she somehow owes her father something. Another girl, Taylor, seems to be waking up to how unfairly her parents treat her. It starts when her parents discover photos on Facebook where she was mugging for the camera. It’s all very adolescent and innocent, but because she’s trying to look a little sexy, they flip out and decide to punish her by making her go through “purity” classes again.

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Taylor is only 16, but she’s starting to see how ridiculous all this is. Upon hearing that her virginity pledge is supposed to make not just her vagina her father’s property, but her lips as well, she freaks out and starts to complain, correctly, that this is all completely ridiculous. At 16, it’s easy enough to say you’re not going to have sex, but being told you can’t kiss and hug boys at all really drives home how unfair and ridiculous this is.

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The show makes it really clear what’s going on here: The parents are exploiting their children’s dependence on them and love for them to extract promises that the girls will eventually break. And should break, because their parents are wrong to demand ownership over the girls’ sexualities. But when it’s your parents, it’s really hard to handle how incredibly unfair they are being to you. It’s nearly impossible, in fact, to face up to the fact that they are using your love for them as leverage to try to control you, and to make you feel guilty when you invariably decide to have sex on your own schedule instead of the one they wrote for you. Taylor is still young, but she’s already seeing serious flaws in what her father demands of her.

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It’s a shame she’s made to feel badly, when this situation is 100% her father’s fault for trying to exert control over what does not belong to him, which is his daughter’s life and daughter’s body. That’s what I kept thinking, over and over again, watching this show: How unnecessary all this is. None of this strife between parents and daughters is necessary, if the parents let go of the illusion that they are the owners of their daughters’ bodies.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Pat Robertson telling crazy lies again edition. This time, he told this whopper about Margaret Sanger:

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The only thing that Planned Parenthood in it early days had in common with the Nazis is that neither of them supported abortion rights, but that’s not what I suspect Pat Robertson is getting at. Obviously, Sanger’s organization came around on the abortion issue, but in the early days, they opposed abortion. Robertson isn’t even making the usual facetious comparison of abortion and genocide. He’s actually comparing contraception and genocide. Because yes, they’re out to get your birth control.

The post Preachers’ Daughters, Family Physicians, and Generation Roe appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Andrea Tantaros on 15-year-olds: Too young for contraception, but babies are a “blessing”

Consensual sex between teenagers is not illegal

More Plan B lies

Rush Limbaugh floats anti-choice conspiracy theory

No, I don’t think we should celebrate teenage pregnancy

Rich Lowry lies his head off

Fox News equates wanting universal health and safety standards with endorsing rape and murder

On this episode of Reality Cast, a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights will explain the latest developments in the fight to make Plan B available over the counter without age restrictions. Anti-choicers react to the new Plan B regulations, and unsurprisingly, they freak out over President Obama’s talk at Planned Parenthood.

Jackson Katz had a TED Talk recently about the importance of men embracing feminism, and not just leaving it up to women. A sample:

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It’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s totally true: We often don’t think of men as having a “gender”. But of course they do, and realizing that is the first step to realizing how much sexism is as much about reinforcing male gender roles as reinforcing women’s.

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As I’m sure you all know, the Obama administration pulled a double whammy of weirdness in response to a federal judge’s 30 day order requiring them to make Plan B emergency contraception over-the-counter without any ID necessary. First, the FDA announced that they were loosening up the current restrictions, lowering the age to 15 and putting it out on the shelves instead of behind the pharmacy counter. Then they announced that they’re appealing the judge’s decision, angering pro-choicers who want them to just make it available without any age restrictions already. Pro-choice anger made perfect sense: The new restrictions don’t make the drug very easy to get, and not just for girls under 15 who may need it, but also 15-year-olds who don’t have passports or birth certificates on hand, that is nearly all of them. But anti-choicers were still upset because while a bunch of women are still unfairly cut off, the number of women who will be able to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex or contraception failure did go up. And preventing unwanted pregnancy reliably brings out the ugliest side of conservatives. Andrea Tantaros reacted by saying that while 15 is too young for contraception, one should be happy to have a baby at that age, because babies are a blessing.

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She couldn’t be clearer: A baby at 15 is a blessing and one should be excited to have the chance. Contraception at 15 is evil. I dunno. I think most people would disagree. I’ll note Tantaros is pretending that Obama is a hypocrite but she’s the one who waxes poetic about how teenagers should be open to babies because they’re a blessing, while she remains unmarried and childless at over twice the age she paints as old enough for babies, if not old enough for contraception.

While Tantaros was trying to spin forced pregnancy as a “blessing”, the rest of the folks at Fox News couldn’t be more clear: They think teenagers having consensual sex with each other is a crime, and that the sentence should be forced impregnation.

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First of all, having sex at 14 or 15 is not, in fact, a crime. An older person who has sex with a younger person may be committing a crime, but the young person did not break the law even in those cases. Which are irrelevant here, anyway, because we’re not talking about a policy that would prevent statutory rape, though it might prevent victims of it from preventing pregnancy. But even if it were illegal for teenagers to have sex, as Brad Blakeman clearly wishes it were, forcible pregnancy as the punishment strikes me as cruel and unusual punishment by our constitution. But let’s be clear: It is not illegal for a teenager to have consensual sex with a peer, nor is a teenager who is raped in violation of the law, though his or her rapist is.

Blakeman was far from the only pundit to deliberately distort the concept of statutory rape in order to justify forcing pregnancy on unwilling teenagers. Eric Bolling and Greg Gutfeld of Fox News also feigned concern for rape victims in order to justify forcing pregnancy on them.

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As a rape survivor myself, I can safely say that that shared belief at Fox News that the best thing that can happen is to be forcibly impregnated by your rapist is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you actually care about rape victims at all, you want them to be able to move on from their rapes, something that forcible pregnancy makes harder to do. Anyway, the claim that withholding Plan B from rape victims will prevent rape makes as much sense as saying that closing down emergency rooms will prevent shootings. Rapists don’t actually care about that crap. Some of them even get off on the idea of forcing pregnancy on their victims. It makes me ill seeing these anti-choice nuts use rape as a pretext to force pregnancy on the unwilling, since the whole point of rape, like anti-choice policies, is to take a woman’s control of her body away from her.

I’ll add that contrary to their implications here, there is no danger of Plan B being used as a substitute for regular contraception or doctor visits. Research shows that girls with access don’t change their contraception habits. It’s a $50 pill you use as back-up, and no one mistakes it for anything else.

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The very mild loosening of still-too-restrictive rules on Plan B is only part of what caused conservatives to hit the anti-sex, anti-woman fainting couch hard recently. As I noted briefly on last week’s podcast, President Obama spoke in front of Planned Parenthood, and now conservatives are hopping mad because they feel the President they hate should play along with their attempts to demonize the organization and reproductive health care in general. But for some reason, he doesn’t seem to believe that they can tell him what to do, and they’re so mad. So, so mad. It caused another round of conservative media meltdown. Rush Limbaugh floated a popular theory that the fringe anti-choicers have been kicking around for awhile, which is that contraception somehow causes abortion.

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Even though it’s blatantly obvious that contraception prevents abortion, anti-choicers have to believe it causes it or they can’t sustain their entire conspiracy theory claiming Planned Parenthood is somehow an industry, despite being a non-profit, that tricks women into abortion. The reality, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is a women’s health organization that works to make women healthier, and their opposition hates that because they think that if you have sex, you don’t deserve good health or control over your body.

At least one Fox News guest, Nina Easton, finally stopped spinning elaborate conspiracy theories and just came right out and said she wanted teenagers to get pregnant and have babies.

ppfa 2 *

She provides exactly zero evidence for the contention that the main reason young women reject giving up babies for adoption is that there’s some social stigma to it. There’s a Hollywood movie, Juno, celebrating it, in fact, but none celebrating abortion. I have an alternate theory: Perhaps teenage girls don’t want to be treated like free baby factories for strangers independent of social stigma. You could throw a million parties for it, and still I suspect most young women would simply rather not go through the wrenching process of growing a baby, going through immense pain to deliver it, and then handing it off so they can spend the rest of their lives grieving the child they gave up. So much so that even in the 50s and 60s when they forced pregnant teenagers into maternity homes and forced them to give up their babies, the abortion rate was about what it is now. Women don’t really want to go through pregnancy and childbirth to benefit strangers at their own expense. Nor should they be shamed for that, because it’s perfectly normal and rational not to want to do that. Nothing wrong with the few women out there who have done that and feel right about it, but it’s not surprising that they’re few and far between.

Rich Lowry wrote a despicably dishonest piece at Politico where he came right out and said that abortion is pretty much all that Planned Parenthood does, and where he equated the ordinary, everyday legal first trimester abortions they provide on a regular basis with the illegal infanticides committed by Kermit Gosnell. He was then invited to expand on those lies on “Meet The Press”, replete with David Gregory quoting his piece.

ppfa 3 *

When they invite outrageous liars on “Meet The Press”, they do them the courtesy of not reading their most egregious lies to them, so they can pretend they aren’t as dishonest as they are. So, Gregory didn’t make Lowry answer for claiming outright that abortion is Planned Parenthood’s “central purpose”, allowing Lowry to nod along with a reminder that 97 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is not abortion, even though he openly tried to trick his audience at Politico into thinking that’s pretty much all they do. Like Limbaugh, Lowry refuses to admit what’s obvious, which is that Planned Parenthood’s central purpose is actually giving women the ability to control their own health, even if they’re low income. Abortion is part of that, but 97% of their services are other things. No one is trying to hide that. By claiming that liberals mean abortion when we say “women’s health”, Lowry is deliberately conflating contraception and STI treatment with abortion, for the sole purpose of justifying the elimination of all women’s health services. Because yes, they’re out to get your birth control. It’s a shame that “Meet The Press” doesn’t require its guest to at least be non-liars before they get invited on.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, repeat a lie enough and maybe magic makes it true edition. Pro-choicers have been providing coverage and condemning Kermit Gosnell since he was first exposed. But anti-choicers need to believe otherwise, so they just lie about it. On Fox News, therefore, you get this:

gosnell *

This accusation was leveled at Senator Blumenthal because he made the suggestion that any legislation strengthening health and safety standards at abortion clinics should be applied to all clinics. I guess wanting to make sure all health care is clean and safe is like celebrating murder now. It makes no sense, but it’s what they need to believe, so they’ll believe it.

The post The Ongoing Plan B Debacle, and Conservatives React to Obama’s Planned Parenthood Speech appeared first on RH Reality Check.

NPR on the Gosnell verdict

Lots o’ lying

Fox covered Gosnell’s arrest the least

Limbaugh is an outrageous liar, as usual

Matt Barber blames sex education for gonorrhea

Gonorrhea rates lowest ever recorded

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering the Gosnell verdict and its aftermath. Also, a researcher from Guttmacher comes on to explain to us exactly what kind of obstacles women face when getting funding for abortion.

Angelina Jolie, who is one of those celebrities who seems to rise above normal human concerns, made a very human announcement recently.

jolie *

There’s some medical controversy over preventive mastectomies, but Jolie got the expensive genetic testing to confirm she had what she said was an 87% chance of getting breast cancer. Unfortunately, as she noted in her op-ed, most women cannot afford that $3,000 test, even if their doctors think their family history necessitates it.

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To no one’s great surprise, and everyone’s approval, Kermit Gosnell, the sadistic-seeming doctor of Philadelphia who preyed on low income women and performed illegal abortions as well as infanticide, has been convicted of three counts of murder and one of manslaughter. NPR did a report looking at the impact that this case will have on the abortion debate. It was an okay segment, but I think it’s worth offering a few important correctives. To start off with, they interviewed RH Reality Check’s own executive editor, Jodi Jacobson, and she kicked ass, of course.

gosnell 1 *

I want to agree with everything that Jodi said, but add this: I don’t even really think the “outlier” language is appropriate, because that assumes there’s a scale and he somehow fell on it. That is wholly and completely the wrong way to understand this. The better way is to think of illegal providers as alternatives that desperate women turn to because they had no access to safe, legal help. I believe, and think there’s growing evidence, that there’s a growing black market for abortion in this country. To be perfectly clear, most people selling illegal abortions on the black market aren’t sick, greedy sadists like Kermit Gosnell. In fact, most of the black market seems to be websites that purport to be selling abortion drugs purchased overseas. But there’s no telling what’s in those drugs, and women are clearly turning to black markets for the same reason they turned to Gosnell: Because they didn’t think they had another choice. The more safe, legal clinics are shut down, the more women will turn to black market websites and the higher the chance that there’s another Gosnell out there.

Of course, while Jodi was a good, reputable source, they also, for “balance”, had to talk to an anti-choicer. And there’s really not much you can do there—there aren’t any that are honest sources. So Marjorie Dannenfelser of the slanderously named Susan B. Anthony List went on and claimed to have information about other “rogue” providers doing the same thing. So either she’s not telling the truth, or she has information about serial killers committing infanticide and, for some reason, has not called the police. But she’s so busy trying to exploit this crime to try to take away women’s rights to bother with niceties like reporting a crime she claims she has real information on.

gosnell 2 *

Lowering the gestation limits wouldn’t have done anything, because Gosnell wasn’t actually performing legal abortions. He was delivering babies after the legal limit and killing them, often lying to the mothers about how far along they were. In fact, none of the restrictions proposed by anti-choicers would do squat to stop someone who is committing already illegal actions. Not waiting limits, not mandatory scripts, not banning pre-viability abortions. All that will do is create more Gosnells, as women who can’t get early, safe, legal abortions turn to illegal, unsafe providers in desperation.

That’s why the conclusion that this will impact the reproductive rights debate seems off to me.

gosnell 3 *

Anti-choicers might get a popularity boost from making that shift, and they might even get some illegal abortion bans passed from it. But the notion that this changes anything, in terms of public opinion, is completely wrong. Anti-choicers need to convince the public that the vast majority of abortions, where the patient hasn’t started to show at all, are no different than much later abortions. They’ve been trying that for 40 years, and haven’t gotten anywhere. They also have to convince the public that contraception is evil. Basically, the debate is where it’s always been, and as excited and happy as anti-choicers were about Kermit Gosnell, this entire case hasn’t really changed anything about the politics of reproductive rights.
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Insert interview

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Of course, the conviction of Kermit Gosnell meant that right wing media went into overtime telling lies. I thought it would be useful to take some time to debunk some of them. The real lesson here, listening to all this, is that the conservative media does not care one teeny-weeny itty bit about the truth, but will tell any lie, no matter how easily debunked, in order to promote their agenda. Kimberly Guilfoyle of Fox News kicked off the lying marathon when the news broke of the conviction.

lying 1 *

There are two major lies in that comment, but let’s take the first one: That this should cause anyone to “rethink” abortion. Gallup did polling specifically to gauge if Gosnell changed public opinion on abortion, and found that nope, he did not. What anti-choicers are deliberately being stupid about is this: Gosnell broke the law. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be found guilty. People who break the law don’t say anything about people who follow it. The only lesson learned here is that unnecessary abortion regulations drive patients away from good doctors to illegal, unsafe ones like Gosnell. I’ll quote the grand jury report:

Pennsylvania, like other states, permits legal abortion within a regulatory framework. Physicians must, for example, provide counseling about the nature of the procedure. Minors must have parental or judicial consent. All women must wait 24 hours after first visiting the facility, in order to fully consider their decision. Gosnell’s compliance with such requirements was casual at best. At the Women’s Medical Society, the only question that really mattered was whether you had the cash. Too young? No problem. Didn’t want to wait? Gosnell provided same-day service.

Waiting periods, parental notification laws, and other unnecessary regulations that drive up the cost: All these things worked to give Gosnell patients who would have otherwise gone to Planned Parenthood or other reputable providers. The only people who need to rethink their position are anti-choicers who support policies that are a godsend to seedy operators like Gosnell.

Now for the second lie:

lying 2 *

The claim that Fox News was covering this story when other news networks were not is a complete, utter and outrageous lie. Media Matters went ahead and looked at the actual minutes given to the Gosnell story when he was first arrested. CNN devoted 33 minutes to the story, MSNBC devoted 9 minutes, and Fox a whopping 6 minutes. Even if they showed up in court when no one else was there, it’s not relevant—it’s rare to see cable news devote those kind of resources to local criminal trials. The fact of the matter is they didn’t see fit to cover this story as much as more reputable organizations, and only started to do so when they thought it could be used to establish a phony narrative about a media cover-up that actually wasn’t happening.

Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh blatantly lied.

lying 3 *

I have in front of me Planned Parenthood’s statement. It reads, “The jury has punished Kermit Gosnell for his appalling crimes. This verdict will ensure that no woman is victimized by Kermit Gosnell ever again.” I don’t know how you parse that and reach the claim that they wanted an acquittal. Oh, unless you’re lying, which is what he is doing.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, blaming sex education for bacteria edition. Yep, that’s exactly what right wing talk show host Matt Barber did on his program. They were discussing an antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea and Barber blamed sex education.

barber *

The fact of the matter is that gonorrhea rates used to be much higher than they are now, but thanks to sex education, people are better both about using condoms and getting tested. The real reason for this antibiotic resistance is….wait for it….evolution. Gonorrhea bacteria are evolving drug resistance. So use condoms and if you get sick, use all your antibiotic rounds as prescribed, to make sure you aren’t becoming a Petri dish for natural selection. But you can keep having sex.

The post Kermit Gosnell Convicted and Asking How Women Afford Abortion appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Kevin Cramer blames school shootings on legalized abortion

Saletan on what Live Action leaves on the cutting room floor

Pat Robertson’s advice

Right wing talk show host wants to shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina

On this episode of Reality Cast, Rickie Sollinger will be on to talk about her new book explaining reproductive rights. Will Saletan shows us the parts of Live Action’s video you didn’t take the hours to watch and Pat Robertson reminds us that the religious right is just plain sexist.

Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota made one of the weirder anti-choice arguments I’ve heard in awhile.

cramer *

Of course, the overall murder rate has gone down in that time. If legalized abortion caused one, then it caused the other, right?

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Complete and total credit to Will Saletan of Slate for digging into the bizarre, dishonest videos made by Live Action that tried to frame various clinics that offer pre-viability abortions of choice as places that perform “infanticide”. The hope was that Live Action could catch another Gosnell, that is, someone who was performing illegal late term abortions and then killing viable babies born alive. They did not, of course, find anyone like that. They didn’t even find evidence of what anti-choicers always claim, which is that clinics are trying to sell unsure women on abortions. In fact, quite the opposite. Will Saletan combed through the footage and found the stuff that Live Action edited out in this highlight video, assured by the knowledge that no one would actually bother to watch it. What he discovered was compassionate providers doing a thankless job out of deep compassion.

Basically, a woman who was 23 weeks pregnant went into clinics to inquire about getting a legal abortion before viability. Most abortions at this stage are done for medically necessary reasons, and the clinic’s response to having a woman ask for one done for choice was definitely not something Live Action included in the edit. But Saletan did.

saletan 1 *

Yep, as Saletan notes, the first clinic worker they talk to immediately tries to discourage her from rushing into an abortion decision and emphasizes how an abortion isn’t a decision to take lightly. That, of course, went straight to the cutting room floor. Lila Rose continues to claim in public that she believes abortion clinics are trying to sell abortions, even to women who don’t want them, but she has herself collected evidence that shows the opposite is true. So, we can no longer give her the benefit of the doubt about being ignorant and have to assume she is lying.

The anti-choicer then tries asking her 15 different ways if fetuses come out alive and are left to die, and sadly for her, the clinic worker says no over and over again.

saletan 2 *

She tries the same routine on the doctor. He also makes it clear that babies are not born alive in clinics and then left to die. But she is incredibly insistent that these workers tell her what they would do in this impossible instance of a baby being born alive and viable. On the cutting room floor, then, went clinic workers saying they would resuscitate and, on the very slim chance of a viable baby being born, they would suggest adoption. Cutting room floor, of course, with all that.

In the Bronx, they didn’t have much more luck in trying to get someone to fit the anti-choice stereotype of providers pulling a Gosnell and tricking women into later term abortions.

saletan 3 *

Heh, basically she’s trying to play an anti-choice stereotype of the dumb bimbo who waits five months and then thinks, meh, I changed my mind. Why anti-choicers think women so irresponsible, even if they really did exist, are ready to be mothers is beyond me, by the way. What she found was that counselor doesn’t actually get these patients, because they exist in the minds of anti-choicers but not in the real world. Instead, the counselor’s advice made it clear that when they see women coming in this late in their pregnancies, stuff is really going wrong for them and they need compassion and help and understanding. Oops. But, as Saletan noted, easy enough to leave it on the cutting room floor.

That’s just a sampling of the professionalism, nuance, and compassion Live Action actually captured at abortion clinics, and then went on to deny and distort. Watch Saletan’s entire video to see some of the rest.

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insert interview

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One of the most fascinating things about the modern religious right is the two-faced way they have of promoting their agenda. If they’re in the political sphere, claims about sexual and reproductive health policy are usually carefully constructed to avoid discussion about gender roles or sexuality. Everything is about fetal life, their weird definition of religious liberty that results in employers being able to take yours away, or fallacious claims that contraception is the same thing as abortion. But in the intra-religious right media, when they’re doing things like giving advice or discussing ethics, all of a sudden the belief that women are inferior to men, women are a servant class for men, and women’s sexuality needs to be tightly constrained while men are just uncontrollable beasts comes roaring out. All this became evident recently on “The 700 Club”, Pat Robertson’s clearing ground for the past few decades for everything religious right. A viewer wrote in with a question.

Robertson 1 *

Robertson, who was instrumental in kicking off the anti-choice movement and generally has been a stalwart believer that women should be punished in every way possible had a completely different take when it came to male cheating. Women who have sex, in his world, should not even have the basic right to say no to an unwanted pregnancy—even if they weren’t cheating, even if they are married—because female sexuality is that evil. But men shouldn’t even have to endure their wife’s anger, no matter how justified.

Robertson 2 *

Love how he just assumes that women are dependent on men, as if we’re not allowed to have jobs. While women and gays, in his world, are expected to contain their sexual desires, no matter how wholesome and non-harmful and loving they are, the same is not expected of straight men. When straight men act out, even in ways that are legitimately harmful, the fault is always someone else’s. Usually a woman’s, such as his wife, who drove him to cheat with her poor housekeeping.

Robertson 3 *

This echoes a previous statement made by Robertson, where male cheating was blamed not on men making poor choices, but women’s clothing.

Robertson 4 *

This time out, not only was the male choice to cheat blamed on women’s poor housekeeping, but also pornography.

Robertson 5 *

So there you have it: Men cannot be blamed for cheating, because it’s always about women’s looks or housekeeping, or the culture at large. But women’s sexual choices are extremely narrow. Not only are we not to cheat, of course, but we’re not to have consensual premarital sex, or even deliberately non-procreative sex within marriage. Just your weekly reminder that this isn’t and never was about religious liberty, fetal life, or anything like that. Just rigid gender roles and the continuation of religious patriarchy.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, violent threats stage of right wing nuttery edition. Pete Santilli has raised his profile in right wing circles lately by bringing on popular pro-gun folks, and so Right Wing Watch has put him on their list of folks to watch. And he recently said this:

santilli *

The gross misogyny that’s always been lurking in the ranks of gun fanaticism has really gotten worse since a gun nut shot up a school and killed only women and children in the process.

The post Reproductive Rights History, Live Action’s Dishonesty, and Pat Robertson’s Sexism appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Hillary Clinton defends reproductive rights

O’Reilly is being dishonest again

Kirsten Gillibrand drops some truth bombs

Andrea Tantaros kind of implies being audited is worse than being raped

NPR on Plan B decision

Laura Ingraham continues to push the claim that you can punish rapists by attacking their victims

On this episode of Reality Cast, a representative from the Center for Reproductive Rights will be on to explain the new Plan B rules. I have another segment covering the victory, and the military is being investigated for its rape problem.

I was off for a week moving and now I’m back, broadcasting from another part of Brooklyn. Let’s celebrate by hearing Hillary Clinton defend the right to control your reproductive future.

Clinton *

She goes on to point out that family planning services actually reduces the abortion rate, basically calling out the hypocrisy of every anti-choicer who claims to be for fetal life but then blocks access to contraception.

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Victory!

plan b 1, playing under the segment *

It took a mere ten years and two presidential administrations, but we did it! The Obama administration has decided to go with what science, feminism, and plain common sense tells you and stop fighting to keep age restrictions on Plan B emergency contraception.

plan b 2 *

Before agreeing to give up the fight completely, the Obama administration has already given in a little bit more. The FDA had approved a plan to take Plan B out from behind the pharmacy shelves and put it on drugstore shelves, like condoms. Only they still required those 15 and up to show ID to buy it, which was unacceptable for a couple of reasons. One, teenagers 15 to 18 often don’t have ID, because the only picture ID you usually have at that age is a driver’s license or permit, and record numbers of teenagers don’t have those yet. Two, a lot of people don’t have up to date IDs on them anyway. I know I’ve gone for months in the past with an expired driver’s license because I forgot to get it updated or I lost it. It happens! But you can’t be expected to get that fixed in time to buy emergency contraception. So this is a big step forward. But for pro-choicers, there is still work to do.

plan b 3 *

So there are many kinds of emergency contraception, but only this one kind will be available over the counter. That’s a big problem in terms of consumer choice, but beyond just that, it’s also a problem for availability.

plan b 4 *

But by getting one product on the shelf, it will likely be easier to get more, so there’s reason for optimism even if the fight is ongoing. The right wing reaction was predictably over-the-top hysteria. Laura Ingraham got out of control.

plan b 5 *

This argument is always made as if the alternative, unwanted pregnancy, is so obviously better that it hardly needs to be defended. But pregnancy creates a much larger hormone spike in the pregnant person, including the young girls Ingraham mentions, and it not only is bigger but lasts weeks if you get an abortion or nine months if you don’t. So if your concern is hormone spikes, then pregnancy is not the better option. Also, the claim that the best reaction to rape is forced pregnancy remains the same naked misogynist nonsense it ever was, a barely watered down version of the prison sentences and even executions that rape victims in more fundamentalist countries face as “punishment” for lack of chastity. Punishing victims is not a way to get at their victimizers. On the contrary, it gives the victimizer a chance to further hurt and control the victim.

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insert interview

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So the Senate decided to have hearings on the issue of rape in the military, which is epidemic in no small part because of massive failures in military leadership to deal with the problem effectively. Because of this, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has started to push for legislation, which has been effective in other countries, removing rape prosecution from the chain of command and having a more straightforward criminal justice approach. Her reasoning is clear enough, which is that a lot of commanders tend to treat rape like it’s just another form of sexual harassment, which is to say more like an H.R. issue and less like a criminal matter. She is very, very clear about this.

military 1 *

Straightforward, commonsensical. Which is why the conservative reaction ranged from incoherent to bizarre to shockingly misogynist. They hate being accused of waging a war on women, but they are no more going to stop doing so than they’re going to stop over the top pandering displays of patriotism. It’s just who conservatives are. Even though in this particular case, male-on-male rape seems to be as serious a problem as male-on-female rape, which means that calling this a women’s issue is even more asinine and offensive than usual. Not that this prevented Sen. Saxby Chambliss from saying that rape is just what happens when you expose young men to actual women.

military 2 *

Needless to say, there’s no evidence that rape is a result of hormone levels or extreme sexual desire at all. As ever, rape is a crime of violence that is usually motivated much more by the rapist’s desire to dominate the victim than any sexual urge. In fact, the military specifically has a problem with men raping men, and most of those rapists who rape men are straight-identified men. It’s not an expression of sexual desire at all, but an attempt to put someone in his or her place.

Right wing media got even weirder about this, if you can imagine. They know they that should be against these hearings because icky feminists are pushing for them, but it’s not like they can just come right out and say they don’t think rape is a problem. So instead you get weird behavior like Andrea Tantaros’s of Fox News.

military 3 *

She was claiming that MSNBC is way off base giving air time to the military sexual assault hearings while there’s supposedly some scandal brewing with the IRS. On its surface, that’s nonsense, because it assumes that a handful of Tea Party groups having their non-profit status denied is a far more serious concern than the over 25,000 sexual assaults reported in the military last year. Even if you accept that the IRS scandal is a real scandal, which is certainly not a universal thing to believe, it defies common sense to say it’s more important than dealing with rape in the military.

Meanwhile, Michael Savage had Allen West on his show, and they were completely off their rockers.

military 4 *

Of course, as Gillibrand’s quote at the top of this segment made very clear, the feminists pushing this are explicitly and aggressively demanding a distinction between fraternizing, sexual harassment, and actual assault. These two are just telling lies to get their audience whipped into a needless, paranoid frenzy about this by telling them that Sen. Gillibrand is doing the opposite of what she’s doing. That’s the level of discourse going on right now: lies, distractions, and paranoid fantasies. Anything, apparently, but actually deal directly with the issue. And why? Is it just because conservatives have a knee-jerk hostility to anything feminists set out to do? Or is it because they don’t really want to treat rape in the military like a crime? It’s honestly hard to tell sometimes.

Unfortunately, Gillibrand’s proposed bill was killed off with a whimper, but hopefully we can keep the heat on the military.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, getting it all backwards edition. Here’s Bill O’Reilly suggesting that the existence of a black market abortion provider who exploited women who couldn’t get legal abortions means that we should, you guessed it, make it that much harder to get legal abortions.

o’reilly *

One question for anti-choicers who claim Kermit Gosnell was providing legal abortions: Then why is he going to jail for it? You can’t be tried and convicted for something that is legal. Gosnell wasn’t in the business of performing medically necessary late term abortions. He was in the business of lying to women about how far along they were and performing illegal abortions. Banning legal, necessary abortions won’t stop another Gosnell, but it will make sure that someone who operates illegally like he did will get more customers.

The post Rape In The Military and the Plan B Victory appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Virginia’s GOP tweaks nominating process for more conservative results

The view of Republican nominees in Virginia on abortion, gays

High school student exposes abstinence-only lies and propaganda

Not a big fan of contraception

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Melissa Silverstein about her new book on female directors. Anti-choice extremists make a bid to wrest control away from Virginia’s Republican Party, and an abstinence-only propagandist is exposed by a high school student with a smart phone in Tennessee.

One bit of good news from the Supreme Court.

Indiana *

The money in question does not go to abortion, but in fact largely goes to preventing abortion by allowing women to access gynecological services and specifically contraception that helps prevent unwanted pregnancy.

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Virginia is a politically moderate state. I know it’s hard to believe it after all the crazy anti-choice legislation they’ve been up to lately, but Virginia reliably swings between the two parties. Indeed, because so much national attention has been paid to the hardline conservatives who’ve gotten power lately, it was reasonable to assume that Virginia’s Republican voters would be interested in running someone for governor more moderate and less obsessed with controlling woman and gays than they’ve had for the past couple of years. Because of that, Ken Cuccinelli, the current attorney general who has single-handedly gotten an enormous amount of national attention because of his attacks on women and gays, decided that he couldn’t win in a traditional primary for the gubnetorial nomination. So he decided he didn’t have to. Rachel Maddow reports.

Virginia 1 *

Why was Cuccinelli afraid of facing up to a traditional primary in Virginia? I can’t read his mind, but I suspect it has a lot to do with his known track record of hostility to gays and to women’s reproductive rights. Even though the current governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, drew unwanted national attention when Virginia Republicans tried to pass a law requiring women seeking abortion to undergo an extra, unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound to go with a condescending lecture. McDonnell was nicknamed Governor Ultrasound because of this, but it didn’t stop Ken Cuccinelli from working tirelessly with the state board of health to pass a bunch of unnecessary regulations that are likely to close every clinic in the state but one. In fact, there’s a lot of sex-related opinions Cuccinelli has that caused him to only want the hardest right of the right to be able to vote in the primary.

Virginia 2 *

It was a clever plan, or it seemed that way, until Cuccinelli found that the same system meant other extremists could get nominated, extremists who are less careful about how they state their extreme opinions in public. That’s how E.W. Jackson, a fundamentalist minister who has previously failed to get elected to public office, managed to secure the nomination for lieutenant governor, even though he has a tendency to say things like this:

Virginia 3 *

I have to remind everyone that this claim is just a way of saying that black women and the men who support them are worse for black people, of which women are half, than the KKK. Why? Because black women, and women of all races, go to Planned Parenthood for contraception and occasionally for abortion if they need it. Attacking the organization is just a way to attack the idea of women controlling their own fertility. Thus, Jackson is saying that black women who want to limit and space their births, often so they can take better care of the children they do have, are worse than the Klan.

Jackson doesn’t care much for gay people either.

Virginia 4 *

It’s worth noting that the main reason that Jackson is a problem for Cuccinelli is that he has an intemperate tongue. Cuccinelli’s public statements have indicated that he completely agrees with everything Jackson says, but he says so more elliptically, to make it harder to contest the public image of a moderate he’s trying to project in order to win the race for Virginia’s governor’s seat.

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insert interview

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Let’s hear it for high school kids fighting back against school officials that insist on forcing them listen to presentations from religious fundamentalists on how the 95% of Americans who have premarital sex are dirty, disease-ridden pariahs that aren’t fit to show their face in public. The latest kid to fight back is a student at Hillsboro High School in Tennessee. The student was pushed into an abstinence-only presentation for freshmen and sophomores at the school by anti-choice activist Joi Wasill and Beth Cox. This anonymous student decided to record the presentation, to expose how many lies were being fed to students to scare them about sex. Those who follow abstinence-until-marriage programs will probably be familiar with some of the tactics.

Tennessee 1 *

This tactic of comparing sex to being used as a spitbucket is pretty common in abstinence-only bullying sessions, which always makes me wonder if these people really are so unfamiliar with showers, much less the way that the vagina actually, you know, cleans itself. This demonstration is clearly meant to get the kids to think of the vagina as, well, public outhouse, as if every sexual encounter is just more semen thrown onto the pile until the woman is a big bag of different kinds of semen. The only purpose of this is to paint people, especially receptive partners in sex, as if they’re dirty people.

And let’s be clear, it was no mistake that the symbolism of the spitting-in-a-cup thing evokes women’s genitalia. She was very certain that it’s women that are “ruined” by having sex, not men.

Tennessee 2 *

There’s no evidence for this claim that women can only attach themselves to one person ever in their lives. Hormones don’t work by burning out your receptors the first time you emit a certain hormone, or else the first time you ovulated, you’d never be able to ovulate again because your hormone receptors would be unable to read future hormonal signals to ovulate. It’s true that oxytocin emits after orgasm, but that’s true for men and women and it doesn’t mean that you’re permanently bound to the person you have sex with forevermore. It’s clear this is a myth that is not only intended to make women feel bad for having sex, but also to scare women into staying in bad relationships by telling them they’ll never be able to love anyone else ever again.

Unsurprisingly, Wasill used this opportunity of a captive audience to dump a bunch of anti-abortion propaganda, by insisting that it’s fact and not religious dogma that “life” begins at conception.

Tennessee 3 *

That’s simply put, a lie. These mysterious “textbooks” she’s referring to are not actual biology books or science books, but may be religious right propaganda of the sort schools are not supposed to be using taxpayer funds to distribute. Biologists are clear: There is no set point where “life” begins. Life is a continuous process. Sperm are alive. Eggs are alive. Life is one big, unbroken chain that goes back to when the first one-celled life form began in the primordial ooze. Nor does the “unique human DNA” thing change that. Each sperm cell has unique human DNA, but it’s not killing for a man to ejaculate and kill millions of them at once. This is simply religious propaganda pretending to be science.

Unfortunately, while there is a lot of outrage about this program in Tennessee, because of the influx of anti-choice politicians making legislation over the past few decades, there’s no law in Tennessee requiring schools to provide factual information during sex quote-unquote “education” programs. But hopefully this embarrassment will help change that.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, we never took you for being a fan of contraception edition. Virginia GOP party treasurer Bob Fitzsimmonds was interviewed recently and he was clear where he stood on the concept of contraception.

fitzsimmonds *

No one is handing out emergency contraception to 12-year-olds, nor are there any plans to start these imaginary programs to mass distribute Plan B in junior high schools. We want anyone who needs it of any age to be able to buy it. So far, I have yet to have a conservative explain to me why someone who is too young for a pill to be taken after sex has already happened is plenty old enough to be a mother.

The post Virginia Extremism, Tenneessee Lies, and Women In Film appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Hillary Clinton defends reproductive rights

O’Reilly is being dishonest again

Kirsten Gillibrand drops some truth bombs

Andrea Tantaros kind of implies being audited is worse than being raped

NPR on Plan B decision

Laura Ingraham continues to push the claim that you can punish rapists by attacking their victims

I was off for a week moving and now I’m back, broadcasting from another part of Brooklyn. Let’s celebrate by hearing Hillary Clinton defend the right to control your reproductive future.

Clinton *

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Victory!

plan b 1, playing under the segment *

plan b 2 *

plan b 3 *

plan b 4 *

plan b 5 *

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insert interview

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military 1 *

military 2 *

military 3 *

Meanwhile, Michael Savage had Allen West on his show, and they were completely off their rockers.

military 4 *

Unfortunately, Gillibrand’s proposed bill was killed off with a whimper, but hopefully we can keep the heat on the military.

*********

o’reilly *

The post Plan B Victory, Rape in the Military appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Meeting women’s unmet contraception needs

Rep. Trent Franks attempts to ban abortion after 20 weeks

Trent Franks is bad at comprehending

Chaos in Wisconsin

Ohio’s new waiting period

Texas attempts to ban most abortion clinics

On this episode of Reality Cast, Rebecca Levenson from Futures Without Violence will be on to talk about reproductive coercion. House Republicans move to pass a pointless bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, and state level attacks on reproductive rights intensify.

Population Action International put out a video making the case for more support for meeting unmet contraception needs around the world.

pai *

Unlike many other uses of our money, this is a pretty clear-cut investment. Unwanted pregnancy is expensive. Preventing it will eventually save a ton of money.

*********

Ours is a country in crisis. Unemployment hovers around 8%, our police state apparatus was just revealed in all its horribleness to the public, and Wall St. Journal writers cannot believe they let New York City get bike share. But despite all this, congressional Republicans think the most important use of their time is passing a bill to ban abortions at 20 weeks even though there is no chance on God’s green earth that it will get past either the Senate or the President to become law.

franks 1 *

All of this is clearly just about creating an opportunity for anti-choicers to grandstand about post-20 week abortions and stereotype women who have them as dumb sluts who are too stupid to get abortions sooner. Never mind that only 1.5% of abortions are after the 20^th week. Never mind that most women who get them are in bad, stressful situations and need our compassion, not our derision. This is all an effort to try to conflate these later abortions with all abortion, and work steadily towards the goal of eliminating legal abortion entirely from the United States. But as usual with these things, Trent Franks got a little overly excited about the opportunity to bash women and stigmatize abortion and ended up saying a bunch of fool things.

franks 2 *

I’m guessing most things are beyond Trent Franks comprehension. He’s claiming that a woman must be evil because she, for instance, aborts after discovering that her fetus will be born without a brain and will only live for a few painful hours. Or that a woman is clearly evil if she gets 20 weeks along only to have her husband abandon her and her children to poverty, and she aborts rather than bring another child into this already perilous situation. The utter lack of empathy for women and the readiness to believe women are evil at the drop of a hat is really astounding. But just to make it even grosser, Franks revealed that he, like Todd Akin and countless other anti-choice men before him, is a rape philosopher.

franks 3 *

Naturally, this led to the usual rounds of trying to parse exactly how misogynist it was to dismiss the 30,000 plus women a year who get pregnant by rape as “rare”, but I’m not interested in all that. Rape-related pregnancies tend to be a much bigger chunk of the post-20-week group we’re talking about than any other group of abortions, because post-20-week abortions are generally a more hard up group. They’re likely to be younger, and a lot of them were raped by friends or family members and were in denial about their pregnancies until they were that late. But it’s also frustrating to me to see people focus on the rape thing as the “proof” needed to determine if the person pushing this abortion ban is a misogynist. Yo, he wants to outlaw all abortion and this is just a stalking horse for that. That’s all the proof you need of his misogyny.

Now the Republicans have put Marsha Blackburn up front on this legislative attempt, hoping that by putting a woman up there and coaching her to be nicer to rape victims, they can avoid the charge of a war on women. That’s where this leads, to them trying to clean up the rape language but leaving in the actual misogynist policy of attacking abortion access. We need to talk about that, because making an allowance for rape victims while still beating on women for having pregnancies that went wrong or for being too poor to get an abortion sooner is still misogyny.

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insert interview

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Things continue to be so bad on the state level that it’s hard to keep up with it all. State level attacks on reproductive rights got a ton of attention last year, in large part because it was an election year. This year, the coverage has died off somewhat, but it really shouldn’t, because things are getting ugly and real inroads are being made against a woman’s right to choose. And unlike the go-nowhere bill in Congress, state level attacks on reproductive rights have a real chance of doing serious damage to women’s health and well-being.

In Wisconsin, progressives were already all fired up because of attacks from the state government on the right to collective bargaining, and now anti-choicers are trying to cram through a mandatory ultrasound law and people are not having it. As usual, anti-choicers know that the more the debate drags out and the more attention they get, the worse they look, so the Senate president tried to shut down debate and push a vote through. And this is what happened.

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Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, so the lack of contraception access will almost surely raise their abortion rate, just as they’re trying to make abortion harder to get. No wonder people were mad.

In Ohio, things are just as bad, and may even get worse.

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They managed to get a condescending mansplainer from an Ohio anti-choice group to explain that this is just meant to keep all those women who randomly wander in looking for coffee and decide to get an abortion instead to stop being so hasty.

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What kind of money is this guy rolling in that he thinks women go in and drop $500 on an abortion on a whim that they spent no time thinking about? That’s what gets me, is the contradiction here. On one hand, they claim that abortion providers are money-grubbing greed monsters, but then on the other hand, they portray patients as cavalier bubbleheads who treat abortion like it’s buying a candy bar. Abortion is expensive. Antis pretend to think it’s expensive because of greed, but it’s expensive because outpatient surgery has a lot of overhead. But either way, the fact that it’s expensive alone prevents it from being a cavalier decision. This is about delaying it in hopes that women run out of sick days or the ability to travel to get to the clinic and instead are forced to give birth.

Texas is another state where they stripped Planned Parenthood of a bunch of funding and already have a high unintended pregnancy rate. And of course, that means another round of attacks on abortion rights. Now they’re trying to pass an omnibus bill, which Amy Hagstrom Miller explained on MSNBC.

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The bill is one that requires hospital admitting privileges for doctors, even though abortion has a hospitalization rate that’s similar to getting a cavity drilled. It also requires clinics to meet the requirements for ambulatory surgical centers, even though abortion doesn’t require making incisions. It’s a move that will shut down all but five clinics in the great big state of Texas. And it’s being passed through this dishonest method. Which is how anti-choicers work these days, because once you’ve embraced misogyny, more ordinary concerns about basic honesty go flying out the window.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, but fetuses can have penises edition! I don’t even know what to say about congressman Mike Burgess from Texas using this as “evidence” that we need to ban abortions at 20 weeks.

masturbating *

The internal life of anti-choicers is always fascinating when they share tidbits with us. It’s not just that he’s making more of this phenomenon than there is, nor that he’s ignoring the actual reasons women abort at 15 or 16 weeks. It’s also his deep assurance that masturbation is a male-only phenomenon. That’s what really made me laugh about this.

The post Congressional Abortion Ban, State Level Attacks, and Reproductive Coercion appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Masturbating fetuses, redux

It was a girl. At 32 weeks.

Texas House passes anti-choice omnibus bill during special session

Texas legislator claims rape kits are a kind of abortion

Rachel Maddow reports on Texas uprising against anti-choicers

Ohio anti-choicers seek to raise abortion rate

Know your place

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll have Jessica Luther reporting from the ground in Texas, where anti-choicers have pushed for a massive anti-abortion bill in a special session. More reporting on that bill, and another segment on how Ohio is trying to kill off affordable contraception.

Satirical right winger Susie Sampson heard about the Texas politician who defended banning abortion because fetuses supposedly masturbate at 15 weeks, which turns out not to be even close to true. And she has thoughts.

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Turns out that he was misremembering a paper where a fetus at 32 weeks gestation was seen masturbating. So twice as far along. Oh, and it was a girl. So, yeah.

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Things are getting really scary in Texas, y’all. The state house basically called a special session in no small part to pass an anti-choice omnibus bill that they couldn’t get the political will to pass in the regular session.

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Oh, anti-choicers love to gloat about how clever they are, attacking women’s rights while pretending that they’re just trying to make abortion—which they routinely call murder—safer. Why would you want to make what you consider murder safer, unless there’s something very, very wrong with you? They don’t. On the contrary, this is aimed at making sure abortions are performed as much as possible on the black market, often with drugs that, if you’re lucky, were bought in Mexico and smuggled in. If you’re not lucky, they could be a mish-mash of whatever. The fact of the matter is abortion is an outpatient procedure, often done with a pill, and you don’t need surgical facilities like a hospital to do it.

As is par for the course these days, the anti-choicers had to say a bunch of really offensive stuff based on their fantasies of how reproduction works instead of the scientific realities. This time, the weird fantasy of what the biological realities of rape looks like came from a woman, Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, who was explaining why rape victims don’t need access to abortion.

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First of all, “cleaning out” a woman of a pregnancy is, uh, an abortion. You know, the thing that Rep. Laubenberg would like to ban for all women in the state of Texas—yes, this bill only outright bans abortions after 20 weeks, but Laubenberg is part of an anti-choice coalition that wants to ban all abortions. Even those that you euphemistically call “cleaning out” a pregnancy. But either way, rape kits do not in fact involve “cleaning out” a woman of a pregnancy—usually they’re done shortly after the rape, prior to the time conception could occur. They don’t involve any kind of uterine draining or flushing, and let’s be clear, even if there is some kind of douching or whatever, that doesn’t prevent pregnancy. She’s just, frankly, full blown nutters here. The weird fantasies of anti-choicers are hard to even understand sometimes.

Needless to say, and I’ll be discussing this with a Texas-based journalist after this segment, things got completely crazy in the state legislature. Hundreds of people showed up to run a “citizen’s filibuster”, though unsurprisingly the same legislators who were trying to sneak this legislation in by not voting on it during the regular session were completely willing to shut down testimony. Rachel Maddow reported:

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After all this, on Tuesday Sen. Wendy Davis attempted to block the bill by having a filibuster of her own. The tactic worked until about an hour and a half until the special session was nearly over, at what point pro-choice Democrats spent 90 minutes debating procedural tactics. With 15 minutes to go, the vote was called, but protesters started stomping and screaming and delayed it until 12:03 AM. That means the vote didn’t pass, and the bill is dead. For now, anyway. Next I have an interview with reporter Jessica Luther that was recorded in the middle of all the chaos on Tuesday. For now, enjoy Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood reading a text from Wendy Davis to the pro-choice protesters in the Capitol rotunda:

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This is not the end of this fight, as Perry has called another special session, but it is a very good thing all the same.

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insert interview

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Ohio is one of those states where anti-choice legislators are trying as hard as they can to eliminate safe, legal abortion in the state. But not because, as they claim, they love fetal life! After all, anyone who sincerely wants to reduce the abortion rate would demand affordable contraception for all women. But in Ohio, they’re trying to make sure as few women get their hands on contraception as possible. NPR reports:

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It’s been considered forbidden in the mainstream media for a long time to admit that anti-choicers object to any policy that makes sex safer or helps women determine when they give birth. This is doubly, triply true for low income women. This rule that we’re supposed to pretend that this is about fetal life held even when conservatives openly started attacking family planning services that are known to prevent abortion, such as subsidized contraception. That’s because anti-choicers pretended that their efforts to increase the abortion rate by denying women contraception were somehow a blow to abortion because the services are often in the same building. But now, even that ruse is falling away, and NPR allowed someone to say on air what’s really going on.

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She continued, making explicit what’s at the center of all this.

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Exactly. The family planning centers targeted by this strategy aren’t just those that also offer abortion, though that’s counterproductive enough if your real goal was reducing the abortion rate. They are those that are simply set up to help women get affordable contraception, often because they aren’t insured. You won’t be surprised, therefore, to hear that Ohio Right To Life lobbied hard to end family planning services, even though doing so is known to raise the abortion rate.

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As they learned in Texas, however, those numbers are meaningless, because they’re generally compiled by anti-choice groups who are trying to create the illusion that this is about abortion when in fact it’s about reducing contraception access. A lot of the people they claim can help you out with contraception don’t actually provide that service, generally because they have other priorities. In Texas, a lot of the clinics anti-choicers claimed women could go to for Medicaid-covered services were heart doctors and cancer specialists, not doctors who provide Pap smears and birth control pills. Sounds like Ohio may be facing similar problems, according to the manager of the family planning clinic they first interviewed. You know, the one that doesn’t provide abortion and is likely getting its funds cut anyway?

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In addition, the funding cuts mean that family planning clinics will not be part of a larger drug discount program that makes the drugs cheaper. That means that even if other clinics picked up some of the slack, they wouldn’t be able to provide the same low prices on drugs. That prices contraception out of the range of lower income women, which is again something that happened in Texas, causing a minor surge right away in the unintended pregnancy rate. That, I would argue, is the point of all this. Because anyone who really does want to lower the abortion rate because they think abortion is killing would be doing everything in his power to get cheap and free contraception to women, not the opposite.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, so this happened edition. On Fox News, Tamara Holder went on Fox News and Bill Cunningham started yelling at her and shoving his finger in her face. She reacted understandably and boom!

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His beef with her was she treated him like he was treating her, and he straight up said she doesn’t get to do that because as a woman it’s not her place. And yeah.

The post Texas Filibuster and Ohio Family Planning Defunding appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Bill Maher explains it all

Rick Perry mansplains

Bill Zedler calls Wendy Davis a terrorist

Sen. Dan Patrick self-pities

Peggy Noonan is so very good at bad faith arguments

Leticia Van de Putte on the Texas bill

Louie Gohmert makes stuff up

On this episode of Reality Cast, it’s going to be a lot of coverage of the biggest story in reproductive rights now, the fight over a massive abortion bill in Texas. But really, it’s just part of a bigger story of anti-choicers playing dirty because they can’t get their bills passed playing it straight.

It’s been nice to see that the recent battles over reproductive rights are waking up some folks to the fact that this is not and never has been about “life”, but about a desire to control female sexuality. Bill Maher, for instance, hit this point hard on his show, talking about the new accessibility of Plan B and the efficacy of the HPV vaccine has riled up the right wingers.

maher *

Ding ding ding! It’s about sex. It was always about sex. It was never about anything else.

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Last week, I covered all the fun, exciting aspects of the filibuster and other efforts from pro-choicers that shut down SB5, a massive anti-abortion omnibus bill that would shut down all but 5 clinics in the state of Texas. As you can imagine, anti-choicers took the defeat with maturity and grace, as befits people who are all about “life” and are totally not in this because they are misogynists who want to punish women for having sex. Ha! Just kidding. The general tone of the response was sexist blather, petulant tantrum-throwing, and the usual idiocy we’ve come to expect from the right. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst snottily say, “See you soon,” when he announced that the bill was dead, basically making it clear that they weren’t even going to hesitate to call another special session to push this thing through. Gov. Rick Perry did just that, and then went on a tour of condescending to the stupid ladies who think they get to have an opinion on their own health care options.

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How nice of Perry to hold the little lady’s hand and explain, because ladies are stupid and slow you know, what she should have learned from her own life, instead of what she learned. Because Sen. Davis chose to have children, the choice to not have children or to delay having children must be taken away. By the same logic, because Davis did so well at Harvard, I guess Perry’s own alma mater of Texas A&M needs to be shut down. After all, if one choice worked out for Wendy Davis, all other choices must be taken away. Hey, don’t blame me! It’s Perry who believes that there should only be one single choice for all people. He’s so into the only-one-choice philosophy, he’s calling a special session to force the issue. To be consistent, he needs to ban wine because Wendy Davis drinks beer and to ban pant suits because Wendy David wears skirts. I do look forward to seeing him in a pink skirt suit, however, since he’s decided that the choice Wendy Davis made should be enforced on the rest of us by law, even though Wendy Davis herself disagrees.

Other anti-choice politicians also made asses out of themselves. State Rep. Bill Zedler called Davis a “terrorist” on Twitter, even though abortion providers are often targeted by actual violent terrorists that have murdered providers. State. Sen. Dan Patrick played the martyr on Mike Huckabee’s show, comparing himself to Jesus for wanting to violate Texas Senate rules that allow a filibuster.

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You know, if Jesus had really thought abortion was so bad, he should have bothered to mention it. Not that it matters, since we’re still formally a nation that has freedom of religion, even though the religious right wants to force their beliefs by law on the rest of us. But while Jesus didn’t mention abortion, he was very clear about how he wanted his followers to regard the law. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” In other words, follow the damn law, even if you don’t like it. Which means not breaking the rules of the Senate, and not trying to falsify the time stamp on the vote to make it seem like it was taken on time, which Republicans admitted it was not.

There was a lot of anti-choice silliness in the media after this, but for my money, Peggy Noonan was probably the worst with her condescending silliness.

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Peggy Noonan is thoroughly dishonest. As made clear by the comments earlier, Texas politicians aren’t hiding this: The bill is meant to end most safe, legal abortions. Noonan is also being dishonest by focusing on so-called “late” term abortions, of which 20 weeks isn’t. That’s only a small part of the bill, and the bigger part is shutting down 37 out of 42 clinics in the state, most of which only do first term abortions anyway. But the best part of her little tantrum is calling Wendy Davis a “young woman” in an effort to make her seem like an inexperienced, naïve girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Davis is 50 years old, only 12 years younger than Noonan. Though I suppose the way that the anti-choice movement is going, that means that Noonan should consider herself plenty old enough to be Davis’s mother.

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insert interview

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Anti-choicers know that their preferred polices are unpopular, which is why they’re increasingly looking for ways to pass anti-choice legislation into law without drawing too much attention to it. Texas politicians obviously thought that the best way to do that was to pass an anti-abortion bill during a special session, and it backfired, but Ohio anti-choicers had a little more luck with their sleazy strategy of tacking anti-abortion and anti-contraception legislation onto a budget bill. Rachel Maddow reports:

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Of course, Texas has been getting the lion’s share of the attention, and much of the outrage is about how sleazy the entire process has been. Calling a second special session of the legislature is just plain ol’ dirty pool, especially since abortion shouldn’t have been brought up in the first special session, which is set aside for emergencies only. That’s why Republicans who are moaning and groaning about the supposedly unruly mob at the Capitol are full of it. Pro-choicers fought back using every legal tool they had, absolutely, but the second that Rick Perry started coloring out of the lines, it was on. Wendy Davis was asked onto MSNBC to speculate about what’s going to happen next.

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This is true, but it doesn’t mean that all the crowds that amassed on the Capitol building to protest the second special session wasted their time. After all, the mainstream media has all but given up covering the relentless chipping away of reproductive rights on the state level. Not because they don’t think it’s important, which I doubt! It’s because it’s just one bill after another after another after another and, if your job is getting page views or ratings, you begin to worry that it’s a little repetitive and your audience is going to get bored. This is what anti-choicers are counting on, and so it’s critical for pro-choicers to find innovative ways to keep the heat on. That is working in Texas, and getting otherwise obscure but devoted state senators like David and Leticia Van de Putte onto TV to make their case. Van de Putte was awesome on MSNBC.

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I’ve seen that the relentless lies about “women’s health” coming from the right have gotten a small amount of mainstream media traction, with mainstream sources reporting on this bill as if there was any validity whatsoever to anti-choice claims that these regulations are about safety. Obviously, there’s nothing safe whatsoever about driving women into the black market or worse, to try their hand with a coat hanger. But Van de Putte is bringing up stuff that rarely gets mentioned, which is that actual medical associations and real doctors of all stripes disagree with these bills. The only doctors we hear from who don’t are the kind who, uh, have quit being doctors to go into politics, where their ignorant blather about women’s bodies and masturbating fetuses is more welcome.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, which one to choose edition? There were so many—so many!—weird right wing reactions to the overturn of DOMA. I pretty much had to grab one at random. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas is always a reliable provider of WTF comments.

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Yep, he said that gay marriage has been tried over and over and great civilizations try it and collapse. He failed to note any of these great civilizations, of course, because he was just making it all up.

The post The Great Big Texas Podcast appeared first on RH Reality Check.

How Ohio’s new budgetary strategies affect you

North Carolina banning most abortion

Ohio massively restricts abortion and contraception access

Gov. Scott Walker signs abortion bill in Wisconsin

Martha MacCallum is utterly dishonest

Ohio anti-choicer gives up the game

Sanctity of sperm

Creeping paganism

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be covering all the other states besides Texas that are dialing up the restrictions on abortion. Well, and Texas, just not as much. A policy analyst from Guttmacher will be on to help!

Enjoy this snippet of a comedy video suggesting future laws that Gov. John Kasich and Ohio Republicans can attach as budget amendments to shame and control women who want to have abortions.

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Yep, pretty much.

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This summer a single theme is beginning to emerge: Anti-choicers using backdoor, hidden, and sleazy ways to pass anti-choice legislation they can’t get passed using normal legislative strategies. The focus on this podcast has largely been on Texas for the past couple of weeks, because pro-choicers have mounted such an incredible defense of reproductive rights there. But Rick Perry’s strategy of trying to find ways outside of the normal legislative system to pass an anti-abortion bill is unfortunately the story of the summer in many other states. This is particularly true in states that are swing states, where conservatives in power are eager to cram through a bunch of anti-abortion laws before they get booted by voters next election season and lose their chance. North Carolina anti-choicers had an interesting, and by interesting I mean sleazy, strategy.

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Yes, sharia law. They wrote a bill to ban the non-existent threat of Muslim beliefs being written into law, and then turned around and wrote fundamentalist Christian beliefs into it. Because they are impervious to irony. No big surprise, either, that they passed this so close to the July 4^th holiday. Anti-choicers are giving up on the claim that they are speaking for a silent majority and instead are just going right ahead with looking for every way they an smuggle abortion restrictions in with minimal media attention. Do it during a special session. Do it during a holiday week when newspapers aren’t being read and TV news shows aren’t being watched. Attach it to other bills at the last minute. Anything to minimize the amount of attention they’re getting for this. It wasn’t just North Carolina, either. Steve Kornacki explained how Gov. John Kasich of Ohio managed to slowly build up his approval ratings by avoiding big controversies until right before the holiday break, when he helped smuggle an anti-abortion law into the state budget.

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Sneaking out, scheduling it around a holiday, attaching it to the budget as an amendment, refusing to speak to reporters? This is not the behavior of someone who thinks he’s performing the public will. These are the actions of someone who thinks this might be the last chance he gets to get the uteruses of Ohio under state control, and wants to get that in there before his opportunities run out. Which makes sense. Ohio is a swing state, and it very well could be the last time for a long time that anti-choice Republicans have enough power to get this done. Which is the same story in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker pulled a similar stunt.

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Guess what day he did it? Friday, July 5^th, basically during a four-day weekend when most reporters both on the national and local level had the day off and even those who were working were playing to a dramatically smaller audience than they usually get. These aren’t the actions of someone who is assured that he can make the case for these restrictions in a public forum. No, these are the actions of someone who knows the voters will disapprove and is trying to do everything he can to hide what he’s up to. Once is interesting, twice still could be written off as a coincidence, three is a trend, but this makes it four, so I can safely say that this is a strategy. The anti-choice movement has embraced their lack of popularity and now is just going to try to sneak things in rather than try to persuade the public to see things their way.

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insert interview

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The anti-choice movement’s strategies go back to the days of segregation and voter suppression, where the right wing honed the art of saying one thing while doing another, usually while being completely obvious about what you were doing. In fact, at this point it’s reflexive. No one buys the claim that all these new restrictions on abortion clinics are actually there to make abortion safer for patients, and yet conservatives blithely lie and say that’s what it’s about as if we’re not onto their game. On Fox News, for instance, commentators actually tried to pretend the new abortion restrictions won’t really have that big an impact at all.

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Boy, talk about just reflexive lying. No one is saying that this is going to somehow bring an end to all gynecological care or make it impossible to get. No, that would be the attacks on Planned Parenthood’s contraception and gynecological funding. When we say that 37 out of 42 clinics would have to stop offering abortion, that’s what we mean: They would have to stop offering abortion. Some no doubt will continue on to offer other services and some are more abortion-focused, but the point is that abortion itself won’t be available. Martha MacCallum is just trying to confuse the issue just because the more confusion there is about the issue, the less we’re talking about the reality here, which is the forced-birth agenda of Rick Perry and the Texas Republicans. Again, this is a strategy honed in the days of segregation. Pass a literacy test and then front like, “Don’t you want voters to be literate?”, when in fact it’s actually a test that’s only being given selectively to black voters and it is literally impossible, even for Nobel Prize-winning geniuses, to understand it—or it may have questions that don’t actually have good answers. Pretend that no one is really attacking women’s right to safe health care, but ignore the fact that safe, legal abortion is an important part of health care.

At least one Ohio anti-choice activist, Phil Burress, admitted that a similar law passed in Ohio is not actually about women’s health and safety, but about making abortion less safe and more dangerous by getting legitimate doctors out of the business. Tony Perkins, the host, realized Burress was straying away from the official lie and tried to get him back to the lie.

conservatives 2 *

It’s a good health practice, according to Tony Perkins, to require a doctor to have a transfer agreement with a hospital but then also, at the same time, ban them from having it. That, of course, is asinine, and Buress was so pleased with himself for getting the state to pass a regulation that pretty much can’t be adhered to by design, he accidentally gave away the game. He even admitted that part of the strategy is using the fear of anti-choice terrorism and pressure tactics as leverage against hospitals.

The good news is that this anti-choice claim that this is about women’s health is so asinine, so transparent, so obviously a lie that mainstream media sources are beginning to exhibit the skepticism they have, in the past, been somewhat afraid to exhibit. I particularly enjoyed Thomas Roberts calling out anti-choicers for their real motivations, which have nothing to do with women’s health and certainly not fetal life.

conservatives 3 *

Roberts is right: This is about the sanctity of sperm. Not even men, per se, because men themselves are frequently pro-choice and certainly pro-contraception. This is about a view of women as so lowly, so undeserving of rights that mindless sperm that are programmed to try to find an egg are considered more important than women. A sperm’s quote-unquote “right” to have its way is more important than a woman’s life, a woman’s freedom, a woman’s hopes and dreams—and therefore it’s also more important than a man who might care about her. Some abstract notion of male power and female submission has overwhelmed the lived experiences of real men and women. Roberts was stabbing at that inartfully, but he definitely has the correct read on the situation.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, pagans, why not edition. Liz Trotta, a Fox News commentator who can always be assured of spewing nonsensical gibberish whose only point is her immense loathing for all other women, dropped this jewel recently.

paganism *

Yep, it seems she is arguing that the Obama administration is trying to destroy freedom of religion in order to shove paganism on everyone through, uh, contraception. She doesn’t specify which pagan religion it is, however. Are we talking ancient Greece or Rome? The various Germanic gods like Thor and Freya? Perhaps she means modern day pagans like Wiccans. Regardless, I think that if Obama really is trying to turn us all pagan, it’s going to take a lot more than giving women access to birth control to get us there.

The post The Many, Many States Attacking Abortion Rights appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Thomas Roberts unleashes the fury

CBS covers Texas bill

Wendy Davis responds to Jodie Laubenberg’s lies

Clinic closures reported on Rachel Maddow

Steve Toth explains sex ed

O’Reilly has a weird idea of how you get an abortion

Sandy Rios has a theory

Oh no, not “community organizers”!

Satan, sure

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be doing more coverage of you guessed it, Texas. Also, the weird right wing reactions are piling up. In addition, RH Reality Check’s own Sharona Coutts will be on to talk about her investigation into a rogue doctor that legitimate doctors fruitlessly tried for years to shut down.

Sometimes, you just have to let go with an epic, awesome, truth-to-power rant. Thomas Roberts on MSNBC let one go that I suspect you’ll all enjoy.

Roberts *

Speak, man! I do think that people are beginning to grasp that they are overlapping issues, but it’s nice to have a news anchor just lay it out so straightforwardly all the same.

********

Well, despite the long, difficult fight put up by pro-choicers every step of the way, it looks like Texas is going to pass a ridiculous and utterly devastating new series of abortion restrictions. Despite a series of protests and polling showing most Texans disapprove of using the special session process for passing this bill, the Texas Senate approved a bill on Friday July 12^th, to be sent to Gov. Rick Perry to sign.

texas 1 *

CBS News went on to interview Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, the woman who introduced the bill to the Texas House in the first place. She openly lied.

texas 2 *

They included no follow-up questions about her attitudes about abortion generally, ones that might help us understand if she’s lying about her intentions, or if she’s really so stupid as to think that the 85,000 abortions a year that are performed in Texas can be handled by the five clinics that this regulation will allow to stay open. For those playing at home, that is 17,000 abortions per clinic per year. That is 327 abortions a week per clinic. That means, for a clinic that’s open 6 days a week for 8 hours a day, that’s around 7 abortions PER HOUR to keep up with demand. Nor did they ask her about relevant issues, such as her vote to defund contraception, which she defended by whining incoherently about “non-babies”, implying that there’s somehow a baby shortage in Texas that needs to be addressed through coerced birth.

Sen. Wendy Davis addressed Laubenberg’s lies about how she’s not trying to close clinics with her bill that just happens to close 37 out of 42 clinics in the state.

texas 3 *

Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that women are going to turn to unsafe or uncertain methods to try to abort their pregnancies. We know this because they already are. As was reported in the Texas Tribune last year and Bloomberg News this week, a black market for abortion drugs is already thriving in Texas. Women cross the border into Mexico to buy ulcer medications that induce miscarriage at pharmacies, which don’t require a prescription to sell that drug. Or, in some cases, they even go to flea markets and get drugs that are supposed to be this drug, but really, who knows?

texas 4 *

Obviously, if you go to a pharmacy, you’re at least getting the right drug, but the pharmacist may not be able to help you figure out the appropriate dosage. This can lead to incomplete miscarriage, which the clinic in McAllen, TX is already reporting they’ve been seeing patients showing up and needing to have fixed. But if they shut down, the only thing left is the emergency room, which for uninsured women is way, way too expensive. And scary, too, because women in these situations definitely don’t want some random doctor they don’t know at the E.R. quizzing them about what they’ve been up to. Abortion clinics are at least safer, because you’re more likely to see them as on your side. Luckily, I do think this will get hung up in court for awhile, though that means Texas will be spending a huge amount of taxpayer money trying to defend a law Texans don’t even want.

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insert interview

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While the biggest theme of the recent attacks on reproductive rights across the nation is the, you know, problems that occur if women can’t get access to basic reproductive health care, the second biggest theme is how downright dumb the anti-choice side can get. There’s just no other way to put it. Every week, my RSS reader just piles up with mountains of people saying the most foolish things imaginable about women, sex, and how bodies work, and usually saying it with the confidence that comes from no one ever telling you just how wrong you really are, at least to your face. Because we both need a laugh and need to know where these fools are coming from, a sampling.

Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican anti-choicer who helped pass the anti-abortion bill in Texas, got into a debate after they voted the bill out of committee with a Democratic representative over whether or not sex education prevents unwanted pregnancy. He said no, and told this story:

conservatives 1 *

Yep, he said that sex education causes pregnancy by getting otherwise chaste teenagers so horny they can’t help themselves. In the era of porn on every phone, of course. Just in case you’re sincerely worried that sex ed is taking otherwise asexual kids and causing a flip to switch in their brains that makes them sexual, rest assured, the evidence says no. Research shows kids who get comprehensive sex education and kids who have abstinence-only both have sex, though the former is better at using contraception. So basically, the opposite of his anecdote.

Bill O’Reilly had some interesting ideas about how getting an abortion works in Texas.

conservatives 2 *

Actually, Roe v. Wade allows you to legally have an abortion until viability, period. You don’t have to show up and give a reason like, uh, a hand sprain. They’re trying to distort the issue and imply that you can practically give birth to a live baby at 12 weeks, but really, at that point you have literally half a year to go. It takes forty weeks to gestate a baby, but this sort of rhetoric, coupled with implying that women are supposed to justify themselves when they aren’t, is about confusing the situation and trying to paint women who have abortions are irresponsible, lying sluts. The realities are much different. Most women have abortions in the first nine weeks. After 20 weeks, it’s almost strictly a combination of women who couldn’t afford earlier abortions or women who have medical problems. But this entire discussion is a distraction anyway, because the biggest part of the bill is shutting down nearly all the clinics in Texas, most of whom have a cut-off of around 12 weeks anyway.

Of course, part of the problem with the anti-choice strategy now is they’re pretending that they’re closing clinics to “help” women, which is transparently false and kind of hard to argue with so many women railing against you. So Sandy Rios just made up a hell of a whopper.

conservatives 3 *

The myth that women are asexual creatures who only want sex to make babies and the myth that feminists are dirty sluts seem to be at odds, but they’re really not. Conservatives just assume that women who do admit to liking sex are unnatural and wrong, and the law needs to punish us by forcing us to become mothers, which will supposedly set us right and make us not like sex, or at least not admit to liking it, like we’re supposed to. Of course, over 60% of women who have abortions are mothers already, but that, like most facts, is just ignored. Also, the crack about Obama, who is a boring old married Dad, was, yeah. Probably racist, if it could be deciphered.

Joe Pags filled in for Glenn Beck on The Blaze, and this interview snippet with Rick Santorum is comedy gold.

conservatives 4 *

They’ve got our number! We want women to be free to control their own bodies because we’re against freedom and we want people to have basic human rights because we hate the Constitution. Santorum went on to rail against community organizers, even though churches and frankly the Founding Fathers, uh, organize communities.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, sure, whatever you need to believe edition. Anti-choicers are getting anxious because the truth about them, that they’re motivated by anxieties about women and sex and don’t care about life, is really starting to be spoken more in mainstream circles. So they’re upping, well, the intensity of their lies about the opposition. Like Matt Barber on the “Faith and Freedom” show.

satan *

The amount of delusion you have to come up with to convince yourself that the side that produces actual doctor-murdering terrorists is “gentle” is, yeah, wow. But this is pure projection. Every time the public gets a good look at anti-choicers, the public balks in understandable disgust, so it’s not surprising to see this kind of desperate, if ineffective, spinning.

The post New Texas Abortion Law and Fighting Rogue Doctors appeared first on RH Reality Check.

NPR covers new anti-choice strategy

Texas expected to create abortion boom in Mexico

Ken Cuccinelli advocates banning oral and anal sex

Jay Leno takes a crack at Ken Cuccinelli

The women of “The View” react

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Ian Millhiser about a potential new circuit judge and the anti-choicers trying to derail her confirmation. A segment on how seriously dishonest anti-choice claims to be all about health care are, and Ken Cuccinelli really wants to ban oral sex.

Clear Channel is banning a series of ads in Kansas for being indecent. Are they sexually explicit? No. Violent? No. Judge for yourself.

southwind *

The clinic offers abortion, that’s it. But it’s part of a larger push to marginalize abortion, even though one out of three women will get one in her lifetime, making it routine medical care.

*******

There’s been a lot of coverage lately dedicated to the new trend in abortion restrictions, focusing on creating all these unnecessary regulations and pretending it’s about women’s health. But it really, really is not. I was happy to see NPR run a story on it, but really wish they had exhibited a little more skepticism, highlighting how the very people who claim to want these regulations for “safety” reasons also think that women who get abortions are murderers. Which is, if you think about it for a mere second, a major contradiction. NPR interviewed an anti-choicer who was bellyaching that she knows better than the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists what kind of facilities are necessary for safe abortions.

abortion 1 *

Of course, she completely conceals the fact that these requirements are also being extended to the abortion pill. Wonder why! Journalists who are interviewing anti-choicers who are making the claim that these regulations are about “safety”, I beg of you: Please ask the necessary follow-up question. Say, “But your organization teaches that abortion is murder. Why should the state make sure murder is safe?” Anti-choicers have been claiming forever that abortion isn’t real medical care, and now they’re accepting that it is, only to eliminate it.

Even though NPR’s reporter did not ask the necessary follow-up question, she did include the relevant facts: Abortion is safe and these regulations are unnecessary. She also asked an actual women’s health expert to explain what the hell is going on.

abortion 2 *

You definitely get a cervical biopsy in a doctor’s office setting, the same kind that abortions are performed in. And it takes much longer than a vacuum aspiration abortion, and has the same kinds of very minor risks of infection. And yet there’s not a lot of concern about that! Thank god, too, because TMI, I had one and I was in and out of the office in an hour, whereas having to go to the hospital to meet surgical center standards is an all day affair.

The fact of the matter is that they don’t care about women’s health. This is about shutting down clinics, and that much is obvious. What’s a little less obvious is why this is the big trend in anti-choice legislating, and the reason is simple: They’ve spent forty years mostly focusing on direct attacks on the woman trying to get an abortion. They attack her ability to pay for it by cutting Medicaid or insurance funding. They make rules like she has to wait 24 hours or she has, if she’s a minor, to notify her parents. And none of this has worked at all, because women aren’t that easily deterred—contrary to anti-choice myths, when women seek abortion, they know exactly what they’re doing and aren’t going to be easily spooked off. So now they’re putting all their focus on the supply side, hoping that they can just regulate legal abortion out of existence.

But make no mistake, this is not about improving women’s health. On the contrary, this is about forcing women to put themselves in very real danger by seeking black market abortion medications. Joy Diaz of KUT News went down to Laredo and crossed the border to report.

abortion 3 *

Cytotec is available over the counter in Mexico, because it’s also used as an ulcer medication and they’re pretty lenient about selling drugs over the counter there as long as they’re relatively safe to use without a doctor’s supervision. Diaz popped into a couple of pharmacies and spoke with the people there.

abortion 4 *

It is relatively safe to simply take the drug. The problem is that if you take it while you’re pregnant, you may not be taking the right dose. And I worry that the ones they’re selling at flea markets on the American side of the border may be dummy pills or be tampered with somehow. Probably not in most cases, but it’s still a concern. If you don’t take enough, you may end up with an incomplete abortion. It’s just a bad idea having women swallowing pill after pill, hoping this is the one that finally works, instead of prescribing the correct dose up front. But that’s what women will have to do if these regulations go into action. Anyone who supports sending so many women to flea markets to look for pills to terminate pregnancies is not, I assure you, worried about women’s health.

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insert interview

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I have all sorts of theories that are ever-changing about why the religious right seems to be turning up the volume on the attacks on reproductive rights, and particularly seem less and less interested in hiding how misogynist and sex-phobic they are. They used to know more to keep that stuff behind closed doors, but the seams are just showing more and move every day. My current theory is that it’s probably because the rise in right wing media has created a true echo chamber, and they stop understanding that their anti-sex weirdness is just off-putting to the real world. Or, at least that must be the case with Ken Cuccinelli. That, or he is so obsessed with hating sex that he doesn’t even care if he destroys his gubernatorial campaign because of it. He’s actually making his attempts to ban consensual oral and anal sex between adults a major part of his campaign. No, really.

cuccinelli 1 *

Cuccinelli is trying to portray his efforts to reinstate this law, which was basically ended by Lawrence v Texas in 2003, as part of a fight against child molesters. The problem with that is that separate laws ban both child molestation and statutory rape. This law that Cuccinelli loves so much, however, bans pretty much all sex that is not penis-in-vagina sex, though it doesn’t address vaginal rape of a minor at all.

cuccinelli 2 *

The Virginia legislature tried, a few years ago, to rewrite the law so that it specifically excluded consensual sex between adults, but Cuccinelli, who was in the legislature at the time, voted against that bill. He clearly likes it exactly how it is. Loves it, in fact, and has spent an unreal amount of time and energy trying to reinstate this law, even though Lawrence v Texas, the Supreme Court decision that struck it down, is absolutely clear that you can’t ban consensual sex between adults.

The good news is basically no one seems to be falling for Cuccinelli’s line, and now he’s becoming a laughingstock in the mainstream media sources. Not what you want if you’re running for statewide office! Jay Leno, who is probably the late night host most afraid of controversy, took a crack at Cuccinelli.

cuccinelli 3 *

The women on “The View” also decided to take on Cuccinelli’s bizarre campaign against consensual oral sex. They were even more shocked that someone was trying this in the year 2013.

cuccinelli 4 *

The whole thing kicked off an epic Whoopi Goldberg rant.

cuccinelli 5 *

What I don’t understand is that Cuccinelli had to have known this was coming. Oral sex is a near-universal behavior amongst Americans. If you turn on the TV at all, you have to know that it’s a completely normalized behavior. But I suppose he may very well live in a bubble, and because of that, he believes that oral sex is a rare behavior most people find repulsive, or, as Barbara Walters suggests, he thinks it’s a gay-only behavior. Which tells us more about his interior life and what he spends his time thinking about. Obviously, even if only gay people had oral sex, this ban would still be a terrible idea, but even the conservative voters he’s trying to appeal to have oral sex! It’s hard to imagine what kind of votes he thinks he’s going to scare up with this.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, man conservatives really don’t understand the meaning of consent edition. Jerome Corsi recently gave a speech to the Eagle Forum warning that gay marriage means, you guessed it, pedophilia and the ever-dreaded return of Zeus worship.

corsi *

If the only thing that keeps you from raping kids is not allowing gays to marry, you are not to be trusted around children. And why accepting gay people supposedly leads to worshipping the polytheistic gods of old, I have never understood.

The post Feminist Judges, Oral Sex Bans, and Why TRAP Laws Are Increasing in Frequency appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

‘Gynaetician’ parody video

Sarah Slamen on Bill Maher

Texas facing lawsuits

HPV vaccine conference

George Will loses it

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Miriam Yeung will be on to talk about fighting back against a stigmatizing and stereotyping law in Arizona. Texas women aren’t giving up the abortion battle, and there’s been major setbacks in the expansion of the HPV vaccine.

David Cross and Amber Tamblyn have a new comedy video out. Set-up: A woman goes to her doctor and finds that he won’t prescribe her birth control, completely objects to the very concept of an abortion, and prescribes getting married for cramps. She gets upset.

gynotician *

Yep, that’s about right. Check out the whole thing!

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The new Texas law designed to shut down most of the abortion clinics in the state and make getting an abortion prohibitively expensive has, sadly, passed into law, but that doesn’t mean that Texas pro-choicers have given up the fight. Sarah Slamen is the woman who rose to national prominence after a video went viral featuring her getting dragged out of the Texas legislature for daring to point out that politicians don’t know more than doctors about how to provide health care. She went on Bill Maher’s show to get interviewed, and even though she’s basically a private citizen who does activist work but isn’t a professional activist, she had the grace and charisma of someone who is well-practiced at this kind of advocacy.

texas 1 *

This is a part of all this that I think frustrates a lot of us, especially those of us from Texas, where I am from originally. There’s a tendency in much of the media to misunderstand how powerful a state Texas is and how it really can set a national agenda to move this country to the right. It’s really a numbers game. Smaller red states can pass all sorts of anti-choice laws, but they tend to get tied up in the courts. Texas, however, has a huge population and oil money, so it has a heftier tax base, and that in turn means they can throw more tax money at defending these kinds of laws. Also, because they are bigger, it’s easier for the legislature to represent their views as mainstream, even though they don’t actually represent the mainstream of Texas, much less like the mainstream of the entire country. As Slamen points out, they only really represent the views of primary voters in Republican districts, and that’s it. But they run a huge, diverse state and where they go, so goes the nation.

She went on to make it very clear to Bill Maher, who seems to struggle with accepting that this is a “war on women,” that it is very much about that first and foremost.

texas 2 *

With that out of the way, they had a really productive conversation that touched on some of the class and race dynamics that play into this, though I do wish they’d spoken more about how these kinds of laws really hurt low income women more than those who can afford to travel out of state.

Rage and rhetoric are all well and good, but what are the practical steps that can be taken in order to keep this horrible law from going into effect? Well, there’s always the courts. States have to prove that their restrictions don’t present an undue burden on access, and there’s a number of solid arguments to show that Texas’ new law doesn’t meet the standards.

texas 3 *

The admitting privileges thing didn’t get past the courts in Mississippi, ultimately, because it’s like requiring your dentist to have admitting privileges. Admitting privileges are for doctors who routinely see patients they think could benefit from hospitalization or who need surgery with overnight stays. Abortion providers never have any need for either kind of prescription. In the rare case that there’s a complication that requires a hospital visit, as with dentists, presenting at the emergency room is the best solution. But that’s super rare, for both dentists and abortion doctors. The ambulatory surgical center requirement is also ripe for a lawsuit.

texas 4 *

Most of the restrictions start in the fall, and the ambulatory surgical center one next year. I fully expect that they’ll get tangled up in the courts before they can go into effect. The only hope here is that the courts rule correctly and the Supreme Court decides to uphold prior rulings and refuse to even hear reversals of the holds that are probably coming under the current legal parameters.

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insert interview

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HPV vaccination rates are a fascinating area to watch if you’re interested in the fight to improve people’s use and understanding of science, because the resistance to these vaccines sits at the intersection of two kinds of anti-science movements: The anti-choice movement that engages in magical thinking about what sex is about and the anti-vaccine movement that is generally hostile to preventive health care. The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] had a telebriefing last Monday about the new data on the HPV vaccine, and while there is good news, there’s a lot to concern people who worry about the wide streak of science-hostility in our culture. The director of the CDC had some opening remarks outlining the good news, but also the areas of concern.

hpv 1 *

The better than expected reduction in HPV rates despite the relatively low vaccination rates is exactly the sort of thing that makes vaccination such an awesome health care innovation … and why it’s so troubling that we’re not seeing more girls getting vaccinated. Vaccines work, not just because they offer protection to the vaccinated person, but also because they keep her from passing along the virus to others. Sadly, however, there’s a lot of others, too many for all them to be free riders who benefit from others being vaccinated.

hpv 2 *

This is incredibly troubling, because it’s just so completely out of the norm for what you can expect when it comes to vaccination rates. It’s the sort of thing that demands an explanation, and they were quickly able to rule out the possibility that it was just that teenagers don’t go to the doctor as much as younger children, because teenagers go enough that if they were being treated properly, they would be at 93 percent for completing all three vaccinations, and not at the shockingly low 33 percent number that they are at. So they did some research and found two major reasons that I suspect are related that there [are] low rates.

hpv 3 *

Part of this is that doctors can be not as good as they should be about working vaccination discussions into visits. If the vaccine is on a patient’s schedule and they’re there for a regular checkup, then I think it’s easier for doctors to prompt the discussion. But doctors also need to double check vaccination records when patients come in with twisted ankles or because they have a cold. You may not be able to vaccinate right at that moment, but you’ve prompted the patient’s parents and may even be able to schedule them to come back for a vaccination, especially now that under the HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] guidelines, vaccinations are free for those who have insurance. But unfortunately there’s another reason, and you probably guessed it: Right wing anti-sex propaganda is scaring parents.

hpv 4 *

Part of the problem is right wing propaganda about how this vaccine is “permission” to have sex, which the scientific evidence shows is simply false. But I think another part of is that our culture has this weird phenomenon where parents are expected to just generally oppose the idea of their daughters having sex well into adulthood, even though intellectually we know that’s ridiculous. I’m not talking about opposing 11- and 12-year-olds having sex, or even high school students, but there’s this sense that if you ever accept your daughter’s sexuality, then you’re a bad parent somehow. For instance, the most recent scare story about “hook-up culture” in the New York Times took it as a given that parents would be upset at the idea that legal adults at age 18 [or] 19—even 21 or 22—are having sex. There [are] still perennial jokes about dads meeting dates with shotguns, the idea being that older adolescents and even grown women are being preyed upon if they elect to have sex. I think that pressure to always be opposed to your daughter’s sexuality, at least until she’s old enough to marry, is what’s at the heart of this. We need to work on that, and start to expect parents to be realistic and supportive of the fact that all people—even their actual daughters!—will become sexually active and usually well before they’re 30 or even 22 years old. And that they need to be prepared for that eventuality.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, single mothers are to blame for everything edition. George Will got on what was clearly a barely concealed race-baiting rant blaming, uh, “culture” for Detroit’s bankruptcy, and not economic collapse.

Detroit *

What is this “culture”, you speak of, George? Does Detroit have a different culture than the rest of the country? Are they watching different shows, eating different food, listening to different music? No, and clearly some of the problems he’s discussing, such as literacy rates, uh, go back to the fact that Detroit doesn’t have enough money to pay for stuff like schools. As for single mothers, I hardly think mass marriage [is] going to set Detroit back on its feet, but I do love how everyone who rails about single mothers often turns around and opposes access to the tools women can use to delay childbirth until they’re ready to marry.

The post Arizona’s Race-Baiting Abortion Law, and the Texas Fight Continues appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links:

Changing gender norms

Pat McCrory and cookies

Lauren Sandler on CBS

Bill O’Reilly is really mad about some women having children

Fox News freaks out about TIME magazine’s ‘childfree’ cover article

Sandy Rios links homosexuality and rape

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, an experienced domestic violence prosecutor will explain her ideas for improving the justice system. North Carolina’s governor uses shady tactics to restrict abortion access, and the discourse over who and who doesn’t get to be a mother is very telling in this country.

Congrats to Margot Adler for a remarkably honest exploration of her knee-jerk reaction to efforts to be more flexible about gender identity, and how she changed her mind on NPR.

adler *

He caused her to pause and really think about how, even though she’s getting a little older, progress keeps marching. It was a great story on how to learn to be flexible and compassionate instead of knee-jerk reactionary.

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Pat McCrory was very clear during his campaign to be the governor of North Carolina on the subject of abortion: He was not going to sign any new abortion restrictions.

north Carolina 1 *

Of course, on Monday, the now Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bunch of new abortion restrictions. He patted himself on the back for convincing Republicans in the state legislature to tone down the first bill and remove the requirement that abortion clinics meet surgical ambulatory center standards first, depriving North Carolina of the opportunity to spend millions in taxpayer dollars trying to get to the Supreme Court in order to get Roe v. Wade overturned. No, they’ll leave that to Texas. But that doesn’t mean these new abortion restrictions aren’t a straightforward example of McCrory breaking a major campaign promise. For one thing, they were attached to a motorcycle safety bill in order to minimize debate, no doubt because that always ends up giving the media more conservative politicians making jaw-droppingly misogynistic comments, usually about rape, to play on an endless loop on cable news. For another thing, even though the ambulatory surgical center thing was taken directly out of the bill, the new law allows the state health department to write up a bunch of unnecessary abortion regulations. It’s basically a way of getting the same thing done without McCrory being the face of it—the same thing happened in Virginia to avoid having the governor there, Bob McDonnell, be the face of the anti-choice movement.

Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL, explained on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show why McCrory went back on his campaign promise.

north Carolina 2 *

Exactly. He never meant to keep it. But he knows how this looks, so he’s going to engage in all sorts of shenanigans and pretend that this is about women’s health. In a way, it’s even worse than directly breaking a campaign promise and just admitting that’s what you did. McCrory is breaking a campaign promise and then trying to come up with dishonest, sleazy reasons to pretend that’s not what he’s doing. Ilyse Hogue said as much:

north Carolina 3 *

Once you understand that this entire bill is getting passed with a heavy dose of dishonesty and sleaze, you can understand McCrory’s odd behavior. Not just in him sending back the first bill and basically outlining what he needs in order to sign it, as if this were normal legislating and not tying anti-choice nonsense into other bills to minimize debate. Not just his public back-patting where he even went so far as to scold Republican legislators for not focusing on jobs while openly encouraging them to spend even more time rewriting an abortion bill so it could be something that accomplishes the same goals of shutting down clinics without him having to be directly responsible. It was the cookies that made me realize that this whole thing has instigated a string of bizarre McCrory behavior.

north Carolina 4 *

Did he feel guilty? Probably not. The women he gave the cookies to seemed to think it was a kind of condescending gesture, mansplaining in the form of baked goods. I’m inclined to agree. It was quite nearly a head pat. As with Rick Perry’s attacks on Wendy Davis, there’s a tendency amongst anti-choice politicians to start treating pro-choice women like they’re mentally children in order to avoid having to deal with the fact that we are not stupid, not incapable of making our own decisions, and oh yeah, not going away.

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insert interview

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Eighteen percent of American women make it through their reproductive years without having children, a number that most commentators believe will probably rise, too. Lauren Sandler, a writer for TIME magazine, recently published a cover story about this phenomenon, specifically focusing on the subset that is likely to identify as “childfree,” that is people who don’t have children because they very much don’t want to, as opposed to people who have infertility issues or people who it just never happened for but might have done it if things had lined up properly for them. She was on CBS talking about her article, and it was some interesting stuff.

childfree 1 *

Sandler has a book coming out about this very topic, which should be really interesting. Panic about declining birth rates, especially amongst white women, is a mainstay of the right wing media, because it provokes both their fears of women’s autonomy and a diversifying society, but the larger media mostly doesn’t talk about it that much, except when some right winger gets a toned down version of the race-and-gender panic type stuff into a mainstream media outlet, usually by playing it off as some vague concern about Social Security or whatever. Sandler is asked about these issues, but it seems her research gives her no reason to worry about declining birth rates, and a more sober-minded, less racist and less sexist view of the issue suggests that the benefits are immense and the drawbacks can actually be well managed. She’s more interested in what this means for women’s shifting identities, and again, she’s very optimistic for good reason.

childfree 2 *

I will humbly suggest that right wingers who are mad about women having fewer or no children are not actually interested in Social Security or future labor markets so much as they are upset about exactly what Sandler is talking about here, which is how women’s ability to define themselves for themselves is growing with mandatory motherhood being taken out of the picture. Not just for childfree women, either—for women who do elect to be mothers, the fact that they got to make a choice means that they own that choice more than it owns them. The fact of the matter is the same conservatives who whine that women aren’t having enough children often turn around and shame a specific subset of American women, Black women, for having children. Like Bill O’Reilly here.

childfree 3*

So, if the topic is mothers who aren’t legally married, especially if they’re Black, the message is don’t have children and you’re a terrible person for having children. If you’re a white woman in the middle class, the message is that you need to be having more children. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened on Fox News, where Tucker Carlson absolutely freaked out at the possibility that privileged women who have disposable income might not want to have children.

childfree 4 *

Mike Huckabee actually said that he doesn’t think everyone should be having children, though he snottily implied that who and who shouldn’t have children is dependent on political and religious beliefs, which we can understand means he thinks white conservatives should have more and everyone else should have way fewer. Alisyn Camerota specifically singled out Kim Kardashian, who recently had a baby with Kanye West, as someone who shouldn’t have had a child, which should definitely make your eyebrows go up considering the underlying racial anxieties that feed this conservative obsession with controlling who and who doesn’t have children. Needless to say, there was no discussion on Fox about empowering women to make these choices for themselves through contraception and abortion access.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, biggest stretch possibly of all time edition. No, really. In a discussion about how gay claims to be in love don’t count, Sandy Rios of the American Family Association and a frequent Fox News commentator tried to link the crimes of Ariel Castro with homosexuality.

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On top of the just obvious awfulness here, it’s also a straight up lie. I watched that entire Ariel Castro excuse-making speech and he never said he loved his victims, just implied that they weren’t as victimized as they claimed. But at the end of the day, this shows once again that conservatives don’t understand the concept of consent, that they would conflate two people choosing each other freely with a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes women.

The post North Carolina’s Shady Anti-Choice Law, and Selective Panic Over Childfree Women appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Hannity demands government shutdown to prevent low-income people from getting health care

Sarah Palin continues lying

Ginormous Obamacare lie

Toledo is set to lose all their abortion clinics

Bill O’Reilly suggests that transgender protections are a “con”

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to journalist Katie McDonough about why the claims that fetuses feel pain don’t hold up. Conservative attacks on health-care reform ramp up as the exchanges are due to open soon, and Ohio starts to shut down abortion clinics for not adhering to impossible to follow laws.

Jehmu Greene is so awesome. She went on Fox during a segment that was dishonest and implied that the GAO is investigating Planned Parenthood for supposedly sneaking money earmarked for contraception into its abortion side. Greene blasted their lies.

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Simply starting an investigation because of partisan pressure doesn’t mean squat. Like Greene said, they didn’t turn up anything the last six times, and they won’t this time.

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The health care exchanges, which are state or federal run marketplaces where various insurance companies sell plans that meet federally established minimum care requirements, start up on October 1, 2013. The exchanges are one of the most important parts of the health care reform act that was signed into law in 2010 and has been gradually rolled out since then. They’re a big deal for a couple of reasons: 1) Upfront, they’re going to make health insurance easier and more affordable for Americans who are currently uninsured. In some states, the premiums for independently purchased plans are expected to go down as much as 50 percent. 2) The exchanges will become a clearinghouse for other information on how to better afford health insurance. For instance, if you apply to the exchange, you’ll be informed if you are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP, discounts on insurance, or federal subsidies to pay for it. The possibility that millions of Americans might be able to start getting affordable health-care coverage has sent the right wing media into a frenzy, and there’s been a lot of screaming and carrying on that implies that the apocalypse will begin on October 1. The recommendation offered by a lot of conservatives is to, and I’m not kidding, shut down the federal government if that’s what it takes to prevent these health-care cost savings from going into effect. Sean Hannity basically said Republicans should be willing to sacrifice anything, presumably even a functioning government, to keep the exchanges from opening.

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He gives the game away at the end by admitting that if the health-care law is implemented, it will be impossible to get rid of it. This is because it will be incredibly popular. It’s true that people aren’t going to suddenly, 15 years from now, be warm to the idea of doubling their health-care prices for half the coverage just to satisfy the conservative desire to price low-income people out of accessing health care. The reason conservatives want to shut this down now is because they understand that it will be easier to do as long as people don’t have direct experience of what health-care reform really means, and therefore are easier to deceive regarding what this exchange actually does. In that spirit, the lies about the Affordable Care Act have been escalating lately. Sarah Palin trotted out a long-discredited lie on Fox.

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Just on its surface, this claim she’s making is clearly a lie: Quote-unquote “rationing” of health care is not the same thing as these mythical death panels where old people are forced to beg for their lives from some kind of cold bureaucracy. But it goes deeper than that. The health-care plan is there to end rationing, specifically the preventing of people from getting health care because they can’t afford the soaring out of pocket expenses. The underlying argument that Palin is tapping into is the fear that if they let poor people have health care, there won’t be enough left over for wealthy people, and so Palin is functionally saying we have to cut off over 40 million people from health care to protect against an unproven worry there’s not enough to go around. But this fear is basically ridiculous. The people who already use up the bulk of our health care system are the elderly and they’re all on Medicare, and all this bill will do is pump more young and healthy people paying into the system, which will likely mean a rising standard of care for everyone. More importantly, the claim that there will be rationing is based on the very slim evidence that the bill does standardize coverage, mainly to eliminate wasteful spending on treatments that are scientifically demonstrated not to work. That means cost savings and helps patients, in no small part by not wasting their time pursuing treatments that don’t work.

Another lie was the claim that Congress somehow exempted itself from Obamacare.

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This is a zombie lie that won’t die and it depends on another lie to work. It starts with the false assumption, promoted in right wing media, that Obamacare is some kind of single payer national health service like the NHS in England, and that people are going to be “forced” onto it. Nothing could be further from the truth: In reality, it’s mostly a bunch of tweaks to the existing private insurance system, plus some funding help and mandates to buy insurance. There’s no way to be “exempted” from it—all Americans will be expected to have insurance or pay a fine. And that’s not happening for congressional staffers. Like the rest of Americans who are currently insured through employers, they will get to keep their current insurance. That’s it. That’s what conservatives are trying to call an “exemption”, which is like saying you’re exempted from earning money because you have a paycheck. It’s not even stretching the truth, but just a big, fat lie. Their desperation is serious, but hopefully it won’t amount to anything.

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insert interview

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This summer, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the passage of various targeted regulations of abortion providers that are meant to shut down abortion clinics, but now the laws are starting to go into effect. As expected, things are getting ugly and fast. Ohio’s new anti-abortion law practically slipped under the radar with all the attention being paid to Texas and even North Carolina. But Ohio’s law has a little something special in it, and not just because it was passed, like Texas and North Carolina, outside of the normal legislative processes to make it easier to slip in. No, this law actually requires clinics to meet a standard and then forbids them from meeting it. No, really. Rachel Maddow reported.

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Now the law is going into effect, and clinics are already being shut down, even clinics that had long-standing transfer agreements in the first place. In Toledo, one clinic was shut down a couple of months ago, and now the last remaining clinic is about to be shut down, all because of this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t law. This will reduce the number of overall clinics in the state from 13 to 11, and by the time this is all over, it’s expected that half the existing clinics will be gone. Rachel has the details:

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One of the most telling and constant factors in the anti-choice movement is their utter and complete sleaziness, their willingness to do anything, no matter how dishonest or unfair, to get their way. This shouldn’t be a big surprise; they’re attached to the larger conservative movement and that’s just how things go on the right. Right after Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina signed the sleazy, unfair law that will use back channels to basically ban most abortion clinics in the state, he turned around and signed an overtly racist voter suppression law, one that basically banned early voters from voting on Sunday for no other reason than it’s known that black voters disproportionately vote on Sundays.

In Wichita, Kansas, anti-choicers have gotten so bold about being sleazy that they’re petitioning to have a clinic shut down by claiming to the city that it’s a nuisance. Why? Because of the protesters. No, seriously, the claim is that they can’t help but protest a clinic, so it’s the clinic’s fault for existing. That’s high level sleaze.

Will these sleazy tactics work? Rachel brought on an Ohio representative, who seemed not to be too optimistic.

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That said, these things are going to have to go to lawsuits, and the undue burden standard has not, despite right wing hopes to the contrary, been overturned. So while things are bad, the game is not over.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox News thinks boys are lining up to be treated like girls edition. No, really, that’s the excuse Bill O’Reilly trotted out in protest of a new California law to protect the rights of transgender students: That now the cisgender boys are going to start insisting on being able to use girls’ stuff.

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This is how you know the pundits on Fox News are knowingly lying to their audience. They know as well as we do that the a bunch of cisgender boys are not going to, for no real reason, try to be on girls’ teams or use girls’ bathrooms, and that fear of this very unlikely possibility is no reason to remove protections from transgender students.

The post Fetal Pain, Obamacare, and Ohio’s Anti-Abortion Attacks appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Drunk History does Dolly Parton

Mike Gallagher cannot believe it

Navigator funds

RH Reality Check‘s investigation on “state of abortion”

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What does this even mean?

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Sharona Coutts will explain how a fishing expedition to prove legal abortion is dangerous proved the opposite. Fox News tries to link abortion and Obamacare again. And why is the right so upset about California expanding protections for transgender students?

The new Comedy Central show Drunk History had an amazingly funny and touching segment on the history of one of the most sparkly feminist icons of the 20th century, Dolly Parton.

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Not usually the kind of thing I point you to in this first segment, but everyone needs a little tribute to kick ass ladies once in awhile to lift their spirits.

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Oh no, those terrible, evil liberals must be up to something really bad this time. Really, really, really bad, because right wing radio host Mike Gallagher cannot believe they’d even bother to defend themselves this time, because what they’re doing is just so bad.

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Oh my god, what are those horrible liberals doing now? Killing puppies? Banning the viewing of rainbows? Requiring everyone to watch four hours a day of public television? Those crafty liberals are always coming up with new, evil plans to destroy the republic. So what is it this time? Well, let’s go to a news show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to find out how this despicable, indefensible liberal plan is supposed to work there.

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Oh my god! They’re giving out funds to various groups so they can hire people to help the uninsured figure out their insurance options. What next? Is the government going to start building roads and even putting up road signs to help people get around? I know, it sounds crazy, but that’s the sort of evil slippery slope you get on when you start using taxpayer money to help taxpayers have better lives.

Obviously, conservatives realize that it’s probably not going to sell to simply and bluntly oppose the government having relatively modest nationwide grants to help people unfamiliar with the insurance market get the best plans for them. So the hook here to raise the panic levels in their forever-aggravated audiences for Fox News is to imply that signing up for insurance equals … you guessed it … abortion! Because if it happens in Planned Parenthood, that makes it abortion. Sometimes I wonder if they’re half convinced you abort spontaneously if you simply drive by a Planned Parenthood. Mike Gallagher seemed halfway convinced that if you use the navigator system, you’re getting an abortion.

obamacare 3 *

Okay, setting aside the assumption that the government has a responsibility not to endorse abortion—which is an assumption I disagree with, of course—this argument that giving a grant to an organization is a de facto endorsement of everything else they do has some serious problems with it. For one thing, a bunch of Catholic charities are also recipients of grants to do the exact same work. By anti-choice logic, that is tantamount to an endorsement of the Catholic faith. Problem is that having the government endorse a faith is illegal and unconstitutional—forbidden right there in the First Amendment. Having the government endorse abortion, on the other hand, is not illegal nor unconstitutional, and if politicians wanted to put out a public service ad extolling abortion as a great thing to do tomorrow, there’s no legal reason they couldn’t. If you accept that giving a grant equals an endorsement, therefore, the very first people you have to yank grants from are religious organizations. Luckily for everyone, having the government give you a grant only means they’re endorsing the activities the grant is for, not anything else your organization may do. I’m glad that Catholic charities are signing people up for health insurance. I’m glad Planned Parenthood is doing it. We need people to sign up for health insurance, and these navigator programs seem like a good way to get that done.

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insert interview

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Last week on the show, I mentioned during the Wisdom of Wingnuts segment that Bill O’Reilly and his panelists were all bent out of shape over a very simple law in California that allows students to determine their own gender identity instead of have it imposed on them by outsiders. The law is largely a protection for transgender students, and the broadness of it should make perfect sense. By disallowing school officials to interrogate you on your gender, it shuts down an avenue for bullying transgender students that school officials sadly take all too often. Being able to walk into a bathroom without the threat of having someone demand you “prove” you deserve there has to be a major relief for transgender students. But, as O’Reilly’s freakout demonstrated, he simply cannot believe that such a protection could exist. When people wrote into Fox and asked why he is so mean and thinks it’s appropriate to make fun of minors who are going through the heavy implications of being transgender, he responded in his usual belligerent manner.

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A narrative that’s as implausible as it is hateful is shaping up on right wing media: The claim is that these kinds of protections are bad because supposedly cisgendered people are going to start pretending to be trans for the hell of it. That boys are going to just start playing on girls teams or using girls restrooms to be a pain in the ass, and now there won’t be a way to stop them. It’s typical of right wingers to assume that without strict rules governing every little aspect of behavior, people are going to just go hog wild and start acting strange for no real reason whatsoever, which is a funny stance for people who claim they’re somehow standing up for “freedom”. But it seems that a lot of right wingers have suddenly decided there’s thousands of cisgender boys who are only held back from claiming they’re girls because of the lack of protections in California schools for transgender students. Karen England on Mike Huckabee’s show was spouting the same line.

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I don’t know what human race Karen England and Mike Huckabee have experience with, but the human race I know and love is not one where there’s a whole lot of whimsical flopping around, changing what gender you are on a whim from day to day. On the contrary, most people take their gender identity very seriously and working up the nerve to tell the world that you don’t feel like you are the gender you were assigned at birth is not easy, much less whimsical. These narratives remind me of the way they stereotype women who have abortions, insinuating that women just have abortions on a whim without thinking it through and therefore need all these obstacles to be put in front of them in order to make sure they’re really sure. It’s all a lie; the obstacles aren’t there to protect anyone, but to make it harder for you to go about your business peacefully. And so it is with the obstacles they want put in place for transgender students.

Of course, the irony here is that the obstacle they want put in front of transgender students is to make them fully commit to their new gender before they get basic rights. If you really wanted people to think it over, you’d give them an opportunity to try out being the gender they’re considering and seeing how that works out before making the full commitment to changing your paperwork and your name and even your body. Obviously, I support you no matter how you go about this, but it’s really common for transgender people to transition slowly, working up from using the new bathroom and trying on the new clothes before making the bigger, harder-to-reverse changes.

One line being trotted out repeatedly is the claim that we have to strip transgender students of basic dignity in order to prevent, God forbid, pranks. Evil, evil pranks.

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OH NO, NOT PRANKS. Can you imagine what kind of horrible world we would live in if high school students pulled pranks and nothing bad came of it? If a cisgender kid can walk into the forbidden bathroom on a whim, all sorts of horrible things will happen! Maybe they’ll learn that the other bathroom … looks like a bathroom. Maybe they will realize that this prank is actually kind of stupid because no one actually cares. In the real world, kids going into the opposite sex bathroom as a “prank” happens all the time, and the story always ends exactly the same: They realized that there was no there there and the world stayed exactly as it is. Harassing transgender kids has never been the thing that prevents curious cisgender kids from taking a peek into the forbidden bathroom, and even if it were, so what? Will the world really come to an end if a girl realizes that urinals are a thing that exists in the world?

Leave it to Michelle Malkin to just come right out and say what all this is about bluntly: control.

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They can’t stand that they don’t get to control what gender you identify with, and that decision belongs to you. And anything that means they lose undeserved control over others causes a kicking and screaming tantrum.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, conservatives really failing to understand what consent means again edition. Mark Levin, during a rant that was surprisingly incoherent even for him spouted this bit of “wit.”

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He’s objecting to the possibility that people might have insurance coverage for abortion. Once again, I’m forced to remind conservatives that just because you have a right to an abortion doesn’t mean you have to get one. Consent: It’s not that hard to understand.

The post Planned Parenthood Non-Scandal, and GOP’s Failed Fishing Expedition appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Really weird segment on Fox News

Janet Morana, executive director of Priests for Life, blames murder on abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Tara Culp-Ressler explains some of the myths about Obamacare and why you shouldn’t believe them. Meanwhile, Fox News is trying to argue that gender ratings in insurance are good, and conservatives are on the rampage against single mothers again.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has a new video up about the attacks on reproductive rights that dominated so much of the summer.

summer *

To find out more about how to help push back against all these attacks, please go to www.drawtheline.org and sign their petitions.

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As noted on previous podcasts, the health insurance exchanges are starting on October 1st, and in a last ditch attempt to raise some hysteria about it and try to get the Republicans to throw a Hail Mary to stop it from happening, right wing media is throwing a bunch of accusations against the wall to see what sticks. Invariably, this means going to one of their favorite wells, which is trying to stoke conservative male resentment against women. Which led to one of the weirder segments I’ve seen in awhile on “Fox and Friends” which is saying a lot. They brought on Dr. David Samadi to protest a provision in the health care law that requires insurance companies to charge men and women the same rates for health care.

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Yep, they’re trying to stoke male resentment against women by saying, “wah, women, uh, get to go to the doctor more.” Men, isn’t this a raw deal, for you? Women are running around, getting their boobs squished and their cervixes scraped and are pushing babies out of their vaginas, if they’re not having major abdominal surgery. On top of that, women get to nag more and get to be painted as fun-killing responsibility machines. Aren’t you jealous? Of course women need to be charged more! I mean, they get to have all the fun. I guess men could get more screenings and check-ups, but they don’t want to, so yeah, it actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. But they plunged ahead anyway. Gretchen Carlson, whose ability to handle her assigned role of smiling sunnily at men who are saying outrageously misogynist things to her varies from week to week, did, to be fair, point out that a lot of the extra visits are for things like check-ups, that prevent massive costs down the road. But she was railroaded and got to enjoy hearing about how all her medical problems are due to her initial failure to be born the correct gender. Like, all her medical problems.

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Sadly, Carlson was so offended by what was unoffensive about this discussion, which was Dr. Samadi’s point that insurance pays for your treatments out of a pool everyone pays into, that she blew right past what was really offensive, which is that Dr. Samadi blamed her Lyme disease on her gender. But what’s really irritating about this is that women get it coming and going. Whenever feminists talk about pay inequality, conservatives inevitably claim that the pay gap is strictly due to women’s choices—that women choose to work less or in less lucrative jobs or whatever. It’s not really true, since evidence shows that women who work equal hours at equal jobs to men still get paid less, and also it’s worth pointing out those choices are constricted by sexism, too. But let’s say you accept the premise that inequality is fine if it’s a choice. Well, the claim here is that women should be charged more for something they absolutely did not choose, which is their bodies and all the attendant extra medical maintenance that comes with them. So, if we make choices, that justifies paying us less. If we don’t make choices, that justifies charging us more. No matter how you slice it, women are not allowed to have the same amount of money as men.

Then there’s the childbirth issue, and how it’s treated like it’s solely a woman’s problem, something Carlson brought up.

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He couldn’t actually get around her point, so instead blamed “the system.” The system that, uh, Obamacare is trying to change so that responsibility is more shared, and he is openly advocating against sharing that responsibility. His preferred system, I kid you not, is to end insurance entirely and have people pay for all health care costs out of pocket, which would be even more unfair to women. That wouldn’t help share responsibility for hospital bills for childbirth at all, but could create a system where more women and infants are dying in childbirth because being unable to get health care without being able to pay upfront would be such a impediment to safe delivery. Something which was also overlooked in this segment, which was mostly about sexist yakking and resentment-building, and had nothing to do with fixing actual problems in our health care system.

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insert interview

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This country just celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the famous March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech and pressure for the federal government to start taking serious action to combat the effects of racism started to kick into high gear, causing the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Fiftieth anniversary coverage, for obvious reasons, had to acknowledge that despite some momentous gains, including electing a Black president, there’s still major racial disparities and continuous attacks on the human rights of African Americans, including a rollback of voting protections. In addition, a new report shows that the income gap between white and Black Americans is actually $8,000 wider in real dollars than it was in the late 60s. So there’s a lot of bad news that conservatives need to distract from, and unsurprisingly they went to their favorite well of insinuating that Black women cause all the problems with their reproductive and sexual decisions. In response to Donna Brazile talking about the voting rights issue on ABC, George Will pompously went straight for this race-and-sex-baiting nonsense.

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Surely, huh, George? This is one of the most irritating tics that right wingers have, in no small part because a lot of people don’t realize how much this whole hoopla about “unwed mothers” owes more to ugly myths about women, particularly Black women, supposedly being out of control sexually. George Will wants you to imagine that three-quarters of Black women are having casual sex and bearing children without the father being anywhere around. Inevitably, if you point out that this is an ugly, vicious, untrue stereotype, conservatives will bleat about how the statistics show that single mothers are more likely to struggle economically. That is true, but it’s a slight of hand. Just because you’re not legally married when you have a baby doesn’t mean you’re single—in many to most cases, it’s actually a couple who is committed and usually living together. Most women raising children alone were either married or in committed relationships, but saw those relationships fall apart. Their experiences are being erased because Will wants to stoke some sexualized hysteria about Black people themselves to distract from the very real problems facing this country. Sadly, he was not the only one. Bill O’Reilly was singing the same tune, though, as usual, he was being even more ballistic about it, daring to speak for a man that actually disagreed with O’Reilly on nearly all topics.

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The gleeful appropriation of Dr. King after his death as a weapon to attack any Black people who have the temerity to still be alive is nothing new on the right. It’s hard to say what Dr. King would have said about all these things, but my guess is not actually anything like O’Reilly is pretending here. King was a man of his time and had a lot of opinions that were of his time, but he was also someone who was intellectually curious and willing to change and grow with new information. The civil rights movement of the time leaned heavily on pop music, even from risqué artists like Josephine Baker, to help spread its message, and so I have to say that I’m disinclined to think that the knee-jerk hostility to evolving pop music and human sexuality that O’Reilly projects onto Dr. King is fair in the slightest. Additionally, Dr. King was a supporter of Planned Parenthood, and in a speech accepting an award, delivered by his wife, he noted that the focus on supposed cultural deficiencies amongst Black people is a distraction from the real problem, which is that Black Americans are, quote, “atomized, neglected and discriminated against.” So I think we have a good idea how he’d respond to O’Reilly’s concern-trolling.

And then there was New Jersey Senate candidate Steve Lonegan, who decided to lecture single mothers who do use assistance that they don’t need it.

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By the way, the question he was responding to, offered by another guest on Up with Steve Kornacki, did not posit an unemployed single mother, but an employed one.

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So, when asked specifically what single mothers who work should do to get health care and food, Lonegan said … uh, get a job. Which they already have. And yes, it would be great if there were enough good jobs so that every single mother, every person really, could have one that paid well and covered the necessary bills easily. I agree. But Lonegan, who is a stalwart libertarian type, actually supports policies that slash wages and end benefits for working class people. So he’s just blowing smoke. This is typical of what the term “single mother” is used for, especially by conservatives, in the media: A way to raise fears about female independence and female sexuality in order to distract from and obscure the real issues at stake. The stereotype of the lazy woman is invoked and even though the questioner actually mentioned that she has a job, the stereotype allows Lonegan to give a nonsense answer that is about distracting instead of enlightening.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, blaming everything they can on abortion edition. Janet Morana, the executive director of Priests for Life, decided to address the senseless murder of an Australian teenager by claiming, without a shred of evidence, that the murderers killed because of abortion.

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As a point of fact, it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that the generations born after Roe v. Wade are actually less likely to commit murder. However, the correlation is almost surely just a coincidence.

The post Obamacare Myths, and More Unfair Attacks on Single Mothers appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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